Re:Extism: Make all software programmable with WebAssembly
by ilyt on Thursday December 01, 2022 @04:19PM
(#33822934)
> 1. Large runtimes and std libs. Python's "batteries included" is the epitome of this but even just java.base is large. This doesn't play well at all with browser cache segmentation.
Right but that's only one, niche use case (why you'd want plugins in a web page ?).
Even if you are web app with plugins
* that is not a problem for first load, user adds plugins later once they get familiar with the app
* you can still (I assume) just download it in the background and shove it into local storage
The whole use case seems to be "there is an app that would benefit from plugins and we don't want someone to learn the language just to write that plugin" and the idea is pretty sound - WASM embeds well and is fast enough.
Right but that's only one, niche use case (why you'd want plugins in a web page ?).
Even if you are web app with plugins
* that is not a problem for first load, user adds plugins later once they get familiar with the app
* you can still (I assume) just download it in the background and shove it into local storage
The whole use case seems to be "there is an app that would benefit from plugins and we don't want someone to learn the language just to write that plugin" and the idea is pretty sound - WASM embeds well and is fast enough.