Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
by krapp on Saturday September 23, 2017 @08:12AM
(#15319386)
I feel like this won't really take off until we have something other than a web browser, or something that just feels different from a web browser, which is optimized for WASM applications, and which includes package management. Caching a WASM application locally is not much different than downloading a standalone native binary.
Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
by archagon on Saturday September 23, 2017 @08:56AM
(#15319526)
Yes! Get rid of the chrome, navigation buttons, etc. and give us a pseudo-VM that runs the browser as we know it as an “app”. I hope WASM and the like might eventually lead us there.
Re:Bringing the web up to speed with WebAssembly
by krapp on Saturday September 23, 2017 @09:29AM
(#15319628)
It makes sense if the web is going to be divided up between "documents" and "applications" (which it is, whether anyone likes it or not) not to run the applications in an environment designed to display documents.
Bonus points if the default is to download, cache and update the source code and "installation" is just local compilation to an appdata folder or something, similar to what browsers do with HTML, CSS and JS, rather than just download a blob of bytecode. That would make the FOSS people happy.
I prefer to think of it instead as native apps going away. Or rather, the web becoming indistinguishable from native.
If native apps start being run on WASM, and web apps start being run on WASM, and the web continues to gain access to more and more "native" APIs... it may not be long before there's basically no difference between a native app and a web app, from the end-user _or_ developer's perspective.