Comment by rvz
3 days ago
Unless you want to install a crypto miner to run locally on someone's machine when they visit a website.
Now possible with this as well as even more capable closed-source untrusted binary blobs with DRM running amock on your machine.
Mozilla (a member part of the W3C) and was supposed to stop such DRM-like software from reaching the web. They have proven to be powerless to allow such software like this to be approved as a web standard.
The ones cheering WASM are the ones who absolutely love DRM and malware blobs in your machine now accessible in the browser.
This is a massive failure of the so-called "Open Web".
Crypto miners written in JS existed long before WebAssembly. Back then people also compiled large C++ code bases to (highly obfuscated) JS code and out of these heroic efforts grew asm.js which then evolved to WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a much better compile target than JS with more low-level types and primitives, but it's very similar to JS code in what it can and can't do in the browser.
Compiling a C++ application to megabytes of JS code doesn't make the result any more open-source or non-DRM than compiling the same thing to WebAssembly (you could translate Wasm to the equivalent but slower JS code).
DRM? That's news to me, the only DRM I was aware of in the web was EME. Can you elaborate?
Or are you just using a different definition of "DRM" to the rest of us, where your definition is "binary format == DRM"?
FWIW I know plenty of people who are excited about WASM because it + WebGPU/WebGL allows them to put their (sometimes open source) games on a website. "The ones cheering WASM are people who push DRM" is patently and obviously false.
(1) WASM can be blocked with regular ad-blockers (just like JS)
(2) you can't do anything in WASM that you can't also do in JS (and the performance difference is hardly noticeable either for well-optimized JS)