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There's a big gap between WASM has issues/limitations, and WASM "might as well not exist." NaCL was also Chrome-only IIRC, whereas WASM is a successful web standard (no small feat).

by torginus3 hours ago|

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NaCL was further along in every meaningful dimension (the ability to run native software at native speeds) after a year or two of development, than WASM is today after a decade (and I think this will be true a decade from now).

So the upside of WASM according to you, is that it got greenlit by the standards committee chaired by companies whose business model would've been hurt the most by a competent in-browser sandbox.

For example, the Epic-Apple Fortnite battle couldn't even have happened. Epic would've shipped it on NaCL and users would've been just as happy, and Apple (or Google) would've had no way of enforcing their sandox.

Whew, thankfully we've been saved from that terrible fate of getting to publish and enjoy software without gatekeepers and appstores.

At least I hope you have something to gain from your opinion, as the rest of us certainly lost out.

by inigyou3 hours ago|

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Surely PNaCl is the one you need, because portability.

by torginus3 hours ago|

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Portability isn't worth as much as it was advertised. There are a grand total of 2 relevant CPU architectures for consumers, ARM64 and x86_64. Shipping 2 binaries is just running the compiler twice.

On the client side, there's just a verifier, and then the runtime basically consists of branching to the first instruction and having at it. Near-native performance and instant startup, you can't do better than that.

PNaCL was proto-WebAssembly and suffering from the same issues. They actually shipped LLVM bytecode, and you had to compile the executable locally with the whole toolchain, leading to quite bad startup performance and a lot of baggage.

Turns out there's no such thing as portable VM assembly. You still have to ship a full compiler (well, JIT) and compile the WASM IR.

Browser vendors have spent uncountable amount of engineering resources on making yet another compiler (actually multiple, since afaik Chrome uses a tiered JIT for WASM), that's neither as good as the big boys, and neither as fast as just running the dang binary.

by inigyou3 hours ago|

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If you make the web dependent on a CPU architecture, you're giving up on a fundamental design principle and also letting one company control it.

by torginus2 hours ago|

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Linux distros are shipped as binaries yet you can still build them from source, and are certainly not controlled by one company, I don't see why that would be the case here.

by inigyou1 hours ago|

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Would you require every website to come with architecture-independent source code? What happens if it doesn't match the compiled binary? Or would the browser compile it every time?

by torginus27 minutes ago|

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The original premise of the argument was about WASM bytecode vs native assembly - bytecode is no more open or closer to the source code than x86 asm. Your questions are completely orthogonal to the argument, so please bring up relevant points.

by pjmlp7 hours ago|

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PNaCL was published with a standard and tooling, it was Mozzilla that refused to adopt it, and push asm.js instead.

Ironically, if it was today, Google could have pushed PNaCL without any problem.

by hypendev9 hours ago|

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> If WASM would've worked as advertised, allowing fully fledged apps to run easily and natively in the browser with no fuss and 90% native perf, then basically all app stores would've been dead.

Working on that! I'm building hypen.space which is platform agnostic language & SDK for building native crossplatform apps.

It's a WASM engine at it's core, and while currently it doesn't have "package this app as wasm" capability but supports streaming/local apps only, that capability is currently being developed - together with WASI layers for all of the platforms.

That way your app can run either as a browser (DOM) app, browser canvas app, native desktop or native mobile app.

It's still early, but moving fast - I just added accessibility support, and the animation framework will be out this week.

Regarding the WASM disappointed, when I started building this about 6 years ago, WASM was in a terrible (barely usable without wasting a ton of time) state. Now that WASI 0.3 is out and LLMs have sped up development by a large margin, it's in a quite usable state to ship things to production without fear.

by mckee_plus_plus5 hours ago|

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Crediting LLMs with advancing wasm is a disservice to the best-in-industry bytecodealliance community & org.