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WebAssembly: An Attempt To Give the Web Its Own Bytecode

Posted by timothy on from the where-is-your-bottleneck dept.

New submitter Josiah Daniels writes with this kernel from a much more detailed article at Ars Technica about what already looks like a very important initiative: WebAssembly is a new project being worked on by people from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to produce a bytecode for the Web. WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is intended to be a portable bytecode that will be efficient for browsers to download and load, providing a more efficient target for compilers than plain JavaScript or even asm.js

2 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. WTF with the new comment links? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why did /. ruin their layout by moving comment counts into the headlines? Sometimes the counts do not display at all. Is Dice outsourcing design to Retardistan?

  2. Re:Makes Perfect Sense by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No. We need to completely abandon this aspect of the browser. Desktop applications are far, far better and their toolkits are far better. What we need is excellent sandboxes so you can download any program and run it without fear of destroying your system. Doing everything as web apps only makes the installation process easier. It makes everything else harder. Instead of trying to make everything else easier, we should be making the single task of installation easier and safer.

    Everything the web is doing already exists in 'real' applications, they're just reinventing everything badly in an attempt to get around HTML shortcomings. The easy solution is to drop back to real applications running with similar restrictions as web pages have. We used to have that but the sandboxes had too many holes. Please just make better sandboxes instead of turning everyone's browser into more of an OS.