Re:Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler
by dmitriid on Thursday March 26, 2020 @05:44PM
(#22698311)
> I must admit, I'm not fully sure I understand what its goals are and what we should expect its usecases to be.
I think the project itself lost its track. It started as an admirable goal of being a common low-level-ish compilation target for the browser. They managed to ship an MVP targeting C semantics.
But now it looks that now people are more interested in writing a yet another compiler to WebAssembly (which isn't even in a beta phase) than developing WebAssembly further. And pushing WebAssembly (which, once again, isn't even in beta) into all sorts of weird stuff like server-side apps. And this is occurring even in the orgs responsible for developing WebAssembly, like Mozilla.
WebAssembly was announced in 2015. In 2017 they had a Minimum Viable Product that was supported in all major browsers. We are a third way in 2020, and there's hardly anything beyond MVP.
Re:Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler
by dmitriid on Friday March 27, 2020 @05:13AM
(#22701350)
Interestingly, I've been downvoted, and yet there's no answer in the comments as to what's the latest with WebAssembly or what is the state of the project.
I think the project itself lost its track. It started as an admirable goal of being a common low-level-ish compilation target for the browser. They managed to ship an MVP targeting C semantics.
But now it looks that now people are more interested in writing a yet another compiler to WebAssembly (which isn't even in a beta phase) than developing WebAssembly further. And pushing WebAssembly (which, once again, isn't even in beta) into all sorts of weird stuff like server-side apps. And this is occurring even in the orgs responsible for developing WebAssembly, like Mozilla.
WebAssembly was announced in 2015. In 2017 they had a Minimum Viable Product that was supported in all major browsers. We are a third way in 2020, and there's hardly anything beyond MVP.