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Major Browsers Add Experimental Support For WebAssembly (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Four major web browsers have announced support for the near-native compiling technology WebAssembly, and collaborated to bring an initial common game demo of Angry Bots, running via Unity and WebAssembly, to experimental builds of Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and, shortly, Safari. WebAssembly was launched last year in a joint project between Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple and Google as a potentially more efficient route to assembly-level performance than asm.js, which is in itself a low-level subset of JavaScript.
Right, now we have an open standard byte code that any language can target, and any browser can implement, along with several competing implementations, and lots of eyes looking at the security of those implementations.
So yeh... HELL YEH, NOW THIS!!!!
It's a replacement of two previous ideas... Mozilla's asm.js ("let's specify a subset of JavaScript that can run faster") and Google's NaCL ("let's ship x86 code directly to the browser"). As best I can tell, the replacement resembles putting a Java/.NET-style virtual machine into the browser to execute a new form of bytecode (.wasm files).
This is good for speed, which is in turn good for developers who want to deliver complex ("Photoshop-like") apps from the cloud.
It's bad for security (expanded attack surface), and it's bad for privacy (more ways to fingerprint the browser).
It's a wash for transparency: today's minified JavaScript is pretty much unreadable anyways.
Probably my biggest concern off the bat is wondering how the ecosystem for web API's is going to work when everyone's developing in their own favorite programming language. Traditionally, JavaScript has been a uniting force in this regard.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
That's a pretty naive interpretation of Webassembly. Let's address your comments.
1) Yes, the target audience are in the native code camp. But outside of mobile, there is no good delivery mechanism, other than the web. This is basically doing that: brining the web to native apps.
2) There is no cross platform sandbox for running native apps, and this delivers on that. All modern browsers at least attempt at security, whereas non mobile platforms offer very little in terms of security against native apps.
3) Computers aren't getting "fast enough" (or much faster, for that matter). Especially not for mobile, which will always be slow because of power requirements. This spec will greatly help with that.
So it serves many purposes, and I think is a wonderful boon to the web.