Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly

Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly by pedrocr on Friday September 22, 2017 @12:40PM (#15313697)

We spent a long time wishing for a VM for the web that could be targetted by any language and being told that wasn't possible. WebAssembly will finally deliver that and it seems to be done by the same people/organizations. What changed?

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Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly by fasquoika on Friday September 22, 2017 @02:49PM (#15314717)

>We spent a long time wishing for a VM for the web that could be targetted by any language and being told that wasn't possible.

Technologically speaking, this has been possible since the days of p-code. The browser vendors have only just decided that it's something that's actually beneficial

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Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly by always_good on Friday September 22, 2017 @09:30PM (#15317490)

It's also been possible since Javascript.

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Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly by jfbastien on Friday September 22, 2017 @12:45PM (#15313745)

Same organizations, different people, and enough time to experiment with (read: suffer pains from) things like asm.js and PNaCl for those people to agree that something like WebAssembly was a good idea.

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Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly by gwbas1c on Friday September 22, 2017 @11:03PM (#15317840)

It's called the CLR. (Common language runtime, which is what C# runs on.)

The problem is that the CLR forces you into a "one-size-fits-all" garbage collector. It's good for what it does, but if your application needs are different, than the CLR just won't work.

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Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly by pedrocr on Saturday September 23, 2017 @05:53AM (#15319000)

There are plenty of VMs out there, the JVM and CLR being the biggest two. Up to now though none were usable on the web.

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