Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me Sick

Re:Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me ... by the_duke on Wednesday May 11, 2022 @12:28PM (#31342226)

Exception handling is necessary to efficiently support languages that need it without giving them direct control over the stack. I'd prefer if exception handling was provided with a more general abstraction though.

GC is necessary for the same reasons, to prevent each language from bringing it's own GC and to enable cross-language interop.

JIT is already implied by the very nature of Webassembly being an architecture independent stack machine, so every runtime has to already be a JIT compiler anyway (except interpreters). Exposing JITing to Wasm code is a natural progression and very valuable.

Not that the WASM spec work doesn't have problems (looking in as an outsider), but the existence of these features are not my complaints.

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Re:Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me ... by lliamander on Wednesday May 11, 2022 @04:33PM (#31345365)

If you want to write in a high-level language in the browser, wouldn't it make more sense to compile to JavaScript?

It seems to me like the main value proposition in Web Assembly was to provide a target for languages like C, C++, and Rust.

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Re:Why I Quit Google’s WebAssembly Team, and How It Made Me ... by kevingadd on Wednesday May 11, 2022 @05:44PM (#31346252)

Compiling to JS is a good option, with the caveat that it will never deliver consistent performance. JS engine vendors place less importance on optimizing for JS transpilers now that the future is WebAssembly.

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