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Comment by torginus

9 hours ago

Yeah, WASM has been a disappointment, and I guess there's a good reason for that. 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.

Native Client, which ran native x86 (but statically verified) code in the browser, basically fit all the criteria, except it wasn't platform agnostic. I'm not married to their approach, but I refuse to believe that this can't be done in a safe and peformant manner.

I guess WASM turned out to be a sandbagging rather than sandboxing technology.

But I eagearly await the arrival of concern trolls who can explain why WASM is slower than JS, and why native threading support is impossible to do securely without imposing limitations, that made sites like itch turn it off, so it might as well not exist.

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torginus

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ttd  7 hours ago

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).

  • torginus  2 hours ago

    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.

  • pjmlp  6 hours ago

    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.

hypendev  9 hours ago

> 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.