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WebAssembly: An Attempt To Give the Web Its Own Bytecode
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
1) Why is this needed?
With the removal of binary plugins in Chrome and Edge (and soon to happen on Firefox), a way to code at native performance in the browser is still needed. Mainly to run high performance games, audio software, etc. You may not want it, but a lot of people consumes this content so there is a large industry behind it.
2) Why not asm.js?
This is almost the same as asm.js, except it's precompiled, so it' s more efficient for Javascript engines to JIT or AOT. Currently, compiling large asm.js codebases results in a large download and resource intensive compilation.
3) How is this different from Java, Flash, Silverlight?
It is different because:
A) It' s a w3c standarized effort
B) All the big players are behind it (Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple)
C) It relies on the browser security model, it does not bypass it
D) It' s a low-level bytecode, more so than AS3, JVM or Silverlight, so it can run any language.
E) It runs in the same "space" as the DOM, it's not a separate/embeeded app.
4) Isn' t this unsafe or a new attack vector?
No, it relies on the same browser security model as Javascript, so It's as dangerous as having Javascript enabled. Read up on how PNACL works for material on why this is not unsafe.
5) Will it replace Javascript?
It is not intended to, but it gives developers the same API with the ability of writing in any language, even C++, so developing a website using tools such as Qt will become possible (efficiently at least).
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.