Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Others Team Up to Launch WebAssembly

Re:Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Others Team Up to Launch W... by Touche on Thursday June 18, 2015 @09:05AM (#9738241)

Serious question, because a lot of people have had this sentiment; what is it you think you'll get from WebAssembly as far as new languages that you don't already get from transpile-to-JS languages today? There's everything from very dynamic languages like Opal to typed languages like Elm. What else do you expect?

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Re:Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Others Team Up to Launch W... by wizeman on Thursday June 18, 2015 @10:08AM (#9738569)

Efficiency and ease of debugging? Just because it's possible to transpile to JS doesn't mean the resulting code will be fast/responsive or easy to debug. Which in turn means it won't be used for significant projects.

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Re:Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Others Team Up to Launch W... by Touche on Thursday June 18, 2015 @12:23PM (#9739647)

Debugging will use SourceMaps which already exist today. As for efficiency, I haven't read anything that suggests WebAssembly will be more efficient than asm.js, why would it be?

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Re:Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Others Team Up to Launch W... by cicero on Thursday June 18, 2015 @02:19PM (#9740576)

Try reading this: https://brendaneich.com/2015/06/from-asm-js-to-webassembly/

"Why: asm.js is great, but once engines optimize for it, the parser becomes the hot spot — very hot on mobile devices. Transport compression is required and saves bandwidth, but decompression before parsing hurts."

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Re:Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Others Team Up to Launch W... by bitL on Thursday June 18, 2015 @05:49PM (#9741819)

Imagine you create a JVM or CLR to WebAssembly converter. All languages and tooling available for them are instantly available for web. Life's good ;-)

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