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Re:WebAssembly: A New Hope by flavio81 on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @02:02PM (#14971896)
In which way it is terrible? It is a Ps and PDF rendering engine. I don't know if you are already aware of this, but Postcript is almost a complete programming language, so writing a Ps renderer is like writing an interpreter (or compiler...)

Not trivial stuff at all.

Also, why do you call this "legacy C++ code"?

Re:WebAssembly: A New Hope by throwaway95014 on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @02:08PM (#14971969)
As I noted, my comment is not about their code. Nor the functionality for that matter. And yes, I'm aware of the issues in PS and PDF rendering, having worked on them as part of a not-so-common and very-common operating system that deeply used them.

Wasm is designed around bringing non-web-native languages to the web. A good project would have been to enable new web native languages to complement JavaScript. Instead, there's an emphasis particularly on bringing C++ to the web. I think this is counter to the philosophy of the platform and harmful in the long run.

Re:WebAssembly: A New Hope by Zelizz on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @03:21PM (#14972656)
It's really about bringing any language that can target LLVM IR to the web, and that's more than just C++.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LLVM#Front_ends

C++ just happens to be a popular choice because there are many useful C++ libraries, and the compiler already produces very optimized code, so the performance benefit is most noticeable. In particular, I'm excited to get the Lua interpreter, written in C, on the web in a performant way.

Re:WebAssembly: A New Hope by kuschku on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @09:37PM (#14975535)
There would be no issue with that, if you were forced to deliver source code, with comments, and without obfuscation instead of a highly obfuscated binary format.

WebAssembly makes it even more common to run untrusted, random code on your system. The next RowHammer.js will be a lot more powerful.

Re:WebAssembly: A New Hope by etiene on Friday August 11, 2017 @05:13AM (#14987875)
> In particular, I'm excited to get the Lua interpreter, written in C, on the web in a performant way.

Can't wait for this!

Re:WebAssembly: A New Hope by flavio81 on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @02:17PM (#14972081)
Why should they complement Javascript? The browser should be language-agnostic, just as your bare metal (computer) is.

Otherwise, then, we should tell people they "must" use C to write applications and that othrr languages should be there only to "complement C."