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Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by goatlover on Monday October 22, 2018 @03:03PM (#18277331)
Wasm isn't really for pretty apps you can quickly make in Vue. It's more for those heavy duty apps, games or libraries that most people run natively because of performance and because they're written in languages like C++, Rust, or even Fortran (scientific computing libraries).

Also, JS isn't the best tool for all programs, and programmers would like more of a choice when it comes to things that are more than just your standard web app.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by marcosdumay on Monday October 22, 2018 @03:30PM (#18277589)
> Wasm isn't really for pretty apps you can quickly make in Vue.

Why not? Developing pretty apps in Vue (or anything in JS-land) is an horrible experience, why shouldn't we use WASM to port some better environment into there?

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by bolb on Monday October 22, 2018 @04:40PM (#18278282)
There are programmers who haven’t worked with anything but the HTML+JS+CSS ecosystem, especially on the front-end. Lots of sunk costs there.

Presenting WASM as a threat will lead to it facing stiff resistance from entrenched interests (amazing that people in their 20s and 30s are entrenched interests, but that’s modern front-end development).

A more gradual, evolutionary, low-hype approach seems prudent, as the platform matures and until/if someone makes the “killer app”.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by goatlover on Monday October 22, 2018 @04:48PM (#18278350)
Yeah, look at what happened to Dart in the browser, which is a shame.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by eksemplar on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @01:44AM (#18280985)
I don’t think it’s horrible, could you point me to something better?

We used to work with, first WPF then web forms and later MVC with razor, and we very quickly bought Telerik because the standard UI components in .Net are horrible.

Aside from that I’ve worked with JAVA I can’t recall what we used before FX but both were terrible.

In the JS CSS environment I can literally make an interface that doesn’t look like ass by simply using the standard setup in a front end with very few lines of code.

I guess a think like Blazor.net might make wasm competitive, but unlike JS, that requires Microsoft not to drop it in a year because they don’t have the OS movement JS does.

I understand why people dislike the package he’ll of modern JS, but so far, it’s proven itself to be just as trustworthy as any curated library.

On the other hand you’re not tied down in JS. When Microsoft made entity they wanted people to use it, even though it’s fucking awful. In JS you can very easily replace a component if something better comes along. That’s a great strength.

Graphql has been really instrumental for us for instance. We operate apps in low connective environments, so being able to only transfer what is needed is really great.

Graphql isn’t JS only, but it takes very little time and effort to setup an Apollo, graphql and vue app, and it’s got very few issues. The .Net integration of graphql is still a 3rd party library that doesn’t really work that well and isn’t easy to use.

That’s the thing with JS, it’s just really productive in the real world.

Blazor.net looks really productive, but it’s only productive when you don’t need it to do something Microsoft hasn’t thought of, and it’s the only WASM integration that I’ve seen that is even remotely competitive with JS.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by marcosdumay on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @12:26PM (#18284790)
I don't really see a need of replacing the DOM. It has some problems, but nearly everything around has at least as many problems, just different ones. Indeed, that's the reason I want to see WASM interact well with it.

The largest problems of the web programming are lack of componentization and Javascript, we may be able to solve that last one soon!

The thing with JS is that it is a no batteries, no novelty, no shortcut, not very productive language, that manages to be both old-school and novel on all the bad ways. You can't just carelessly gather code and use it, because there are no safety boundaries; most code that is not at the frontend (yeah, like Apollo) have no consideration about security, so you can't simply expose it; the entire ecosystem is a house of cards; and the language itself is a pile of WTFs just waiting for you to discover another one.

Besides, the web stack is pretty much controlled by Google nowadays. Yes, they manage development resources better than Microsoft, but I would prefer working on a stable and free environment.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by edflsafoiewq on Monday October 22, 2018 @05:23PM (#18278659)
If there's some better environment to be found in non-JS-land, why is Electron and its ilk so popular?
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by discreteevent on Monday October 22, 2018 @06:08PM (#18278983)
"better environment" - worse is better. Its explained in the comment above you about entrenched interests. Whether js and html are worse in the browser is one thing but I think you could argue strongly that they are worse on the desktop. As a user, the experience for me is pretty bad.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by eksemplar on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @01:28AM (#18280923)
Is electron really worse though? I use VS and VSC professionally and VSC is the best ide I’ve ever used.

VS is great too, but it’s performance is really, really, terrible when your documents and settings directory is on one network drive and your codebase is on another. Not exactly VS’s fault, but it’s an ide for enterprise that can’t function with the most basic enterprise drive setup?

VSC, the electron app on the other hand doesn’t give two shits.

People usually tell me VSC is the one off unicorn. But isn’t discord better than team speak and ventrilo? Isn’t slack excellent?

I don’t think sunk cost is a negative when people are building better tools with it.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by pseudalopex on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @01:45AM (#18280990)
Electron is popular among developers who mainly know JavaScript. It's popular when someone already has a web app or has to build one anyway. It's popular among people who think it's better for their app to look the same on every platform than to integrate well. It seems to be pretty unpopular among people who have experience writing native apps.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by int_19h on Monday October 22, 2018 @10:14PM (#18280257)
Because all the better environments are not sufficiently portable.

That said, even then, I'll take Qt over Electron any day of the week.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by edflsafoiewq on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @12:00AM (#18280627)
If they're not even portable between established systems, how are we going to port them to a comparatively exotic wasm+DOM target?
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by pjmlp on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @02:57AM (#18281288)
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by edflsafoiewq on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @03:11AM (#18281355)
Wasm+canvas is an easier target but even if it gets us to the same difficulty as normal desktop targets, portability between normal targets is already a problem.

My reaction to using the canvas instead of the DOM is very, very, very negative by the way. Webpages with fake text that is actually pixels rendered to a canvas are currently mostly restricted to dystopian notions of either the end result of the ad-blocker arms race or else extreme anti-copying measures.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by pjmlp on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @03:15AM (#18281375)
Basically it is Flash all over again, just now it is built-in in the browser.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by mcl7cdm on Wednesday October 24, 2018 @03:29AM (#18290367)
I think the world MUST start to make/tell the difference between (web)apps and web pages. Slack does not need to be written in js/html. Skype does not need to be written in js/html. They do those in electron just to avoid having to maintain X different code bases.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by pjmlp on Monday October 22, 2018 @06:21PM (#18279079)
Because many don't know any better.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by wild_preference on Monday October 22, 2018 @07:23PM (#18279462)
Meh, the issue with Electron is performance. The actual dev environment is decent, like how trivial it is to bring your own abstractions like React. Being able to inspect element and use Chrome's debugger. Being able to use whatever text editor you want. Using a compile-to-JS language. etc.

I'm certainly not using Xcode + Cocoa + the MVC abstraction for iOS/macOS apps because it's the superior way to build software. It has its own warts, like the effort it takes to swap out MVC with some other pattern, or how it comes with no async abstractions -- you'll just be writing callback code like JS developers had to before the Promise.

It's tempting to unmask "ugh, JS developers" as a bunch of idiots, but I think you'd only be kidding yourself if you think your pet environment is some global optimum.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by thrower123 on Monday October 22, 2018 @09:58PM (#18280194)
Every time I start doing anything moderately complicated in JS, I rage at how much more difficult it is compared to slamming together a UI in .NET.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by eksemplar on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @01:31AM (#18280935)
Really because WPF, web forms or razor all seem very inferior to me than VUE or react.

Hell when we were still building interfaces in .Net we paid a subscription to use Telerik on the frontend because the standard .net stuff is absolutely terrible.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by pjmlp on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @02:58AM (#18281302)
Where is Blend for Vue or React?

I never used Telerik, and we only bought ComponentOne once for a Windows Forms project, started before WPF even existed.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by voltagex_ on Monday October 22, 2018 @11:45PM (#18280586)
WinForms or WPF? I can throw together a (terrible) HTML page faster than I can remember how MVVM is meant to work.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by thrower123 on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @07:16AM (#18282374)
I'm a lover of WinForms, since I cut my teeth on VB6 and MFC... it's surprising how decent you can make things look with a little polishing.

It's nuts that visual layout editors for the web have, if anything, regressed from the WebForms editor in Visual Studio 2008.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by pjmlp on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @03:01AM (#18281315)
MVVM is meant to work the same way as Angular bindings work.

In any case you aren't obliged to use MVVM in WPF, it is just a best practice for easier unit testing and composability. Then again Web Components are only now starting to be a thing.

Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by pjmlp on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @01:33AM (#18280948)
I do native across multiple platforms and Web, being coding since the mid-80's, so the experience is not constrained to a single pet.
Re:WebAssembly’s post-MVP future by marcosdumay on Tuesday October 23, 2018 @11:17AM (#18284067)
Because JS runs on the browser, so anything else is less portable.