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A comment on Making WebAssembly better for Rust and for all languages. Parent comment

Re:Making WebAssembly better for Rust and for all languages by austincheney on Wednesday March 14, 2018 @09:04PM (#16589730)
> One thing that continues to amaze me is that WebAssembly isn't being discussed more outside of the context of the web.

Probably because WASM is a runtime blackbox locked inside a web page running in a browser. There is a huge amount of overhead to that and the ability to interact with anything external to the blackbox is severely limited.

I get that you are excited that WASM is a compile target for many languages, but it comes with a heavy dose of isolation and performance costs.

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Re:Making WebAssembly better for Rust and for all languages by icebraining on Thursday March 15, 2018 @02:17AM (#16590778)
Why is there a huge overhead to that? And how much is "huge"?
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Re:Making WebAssembly better for Rust and for all languages by austincheney on Thursday March 15, 2018 @06:13AM (#16591559)
Because a web browser is essentially an operating system running many internal applications. Simply open an empty browser with a single tab and watch how much memory it consumes. Compare that with a new command shell.
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Re:Making WebAssembly better for Rust and for all languages by icebraining on Thursday March 15, 2018 @08:04AM (#16592058)
I think harpocrates was talking about running webassembly programs without the browser.
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