Will WebAssembly Replace JavaScript? (medium.com)

On Tuesday Firefox 52 became the first browser to support WebAssembly, a new standard "to enable near-native performance for web applications" without a plug-in by pre-compiling code into low-level, machine-ready instructions. Mozilla engineer Lin Clark sees this as an inflection point where the speed of browser-based applications increases dramatically. An anonymous reader quotes David Bryant, the head of platform engineering at Mozilla. This new standard will enable amazing video games and high-performance web apps for things like computer-aided design, video and image editing, and scientific visualization... Over time, many existing productivity apps (e.g. email, social networks, word processing) and JavaScript frameworks will likely use WebAssembly to significantly reduce load times while simultaneously improving performance while running... developers can integrate WebAssembly libraries for CPU-intensive calculations (e.g. compression, face detection, physics) into existing web apps that use JavaScript for less intensive work... In some ways, WebAssembly changes what it means to be a web developer, as well as the fundamental abilities of the web.
Mozilla celebrated with a demo video of the high-resolution graphics of Zen Garden, and while right now WebAssembly supports compilation from C and C++ (plus some preliminary support for Rust), "We expect that, as WebAssembly continues to evolve, you'll also be able to use it with programming languages often used for mobile apps, like Java, Swift, and C#."

Comments

The cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

This new standard will enable amazing video games and high-performance web apps for things like computer-aided design, video and image editing, and scientific visualization...

But I don't *WANT* to do that shit in a web browser. I want it to live on my local computer where companies can't charge me $5, $10, or $250 per month or I lose access to all my critical data.

I'm still astonished that one of my clients is running a Linux mail server and it works perfectly for them. Their total cost over the ~8 years they've been running it has been about $1,000/year, and most of that is paying for us to add new users, create mailing list/groups, and remove fired employees.

Their first year on the Exchange 358 cloud bullshit would have cost them approximately $15k in licensing.

Re:The cloud

[Pinky's Brain]

Since small businesses make up most of the economy I hope we don't run out of small town IT guys.

The professionals seem comparatively completely fucking useless.

Re:The cloud

[AchilleTalon]

Even if I share your comments, the original point about Web Assembly has nothing to do with what the poster complained about. I mean, Web Assembly doesn't introduce that problem, it is already there for decades. So, I welcome Web Assembly for what it is, a mean to increase the performance of applications in the browser. Now, should we or shouldn't we have complex applications in the browser and which ones is another matter.

However, the browser is a convenient way to distribute applications inside an enterprise. In that case, you don't have thousands of unknown parties trying to hack your browser and making it crawling instead of running.

I would probably prefer enterprise applications based on Web Assembly than on Flash or even mostly Javascript.

No

[thegarbz]

But a longer answer is: 99.999% of the Javascript out there is not slow but waiting on some server to send back content.

Yeah if you're crazy enough create a image editor or a game that runs only in a webbrowser then maybe you would consider this. But no it won't replace Javascript.

Re:Native code running in the Browser?

[Todd Knarr]

Hello ActiveX, its been a while! And you never had any security issues did you, noooo, perfectly safe. Thats why its still around today... err, oh, wait...

Yup. We've been this route before. Not to mention compiling native code for multiple versions of multiple operating systems on multiple CPU architectures. Avoiding that's one of the attractions of browser-based applications. Look, a security and development nightmare in the same package!

Re:Real-time bidding

[religionofpeas]

So with WebAssembly, they can spend even more CPU power on collecting bids.

Re:JS "programmers" are too incompetent for that

[Anonymous Coward]

SO much this.

The reason JS gets so much hate is not because the language itself, it's the horrific fucking developers that (ab)use it.
Most of them abstract the damn language away under shit like jQuery that adds a metric fuckton of overhead to the language.

It's not even amateur small-time devs either, it's huge ones too.
So-called Enterprise-quality code, full of high-overhead code for very little functionality, said overhead only there to prevent IDIOTS from making mistakes.
Google even do it. Youtube, Gmail, Maps, all slow as fuck now. Try run ANY of those on a machine from even 5 years ago, never mind 10. They are even slow on modern hardware for NO FUNCTIONAL REASON, just lazy developers writing high-overhead code for obfuscation / low-transmission cost reasons. (yet it would be far easier to compress your code and decompress it on client end, then run THAT, insanely faster too)
The HTML5 video system is so slow it is funny, especially since most major browser vendors are pushing for its replacement as primary content source for video over Flash. The piece of shit spec has barely any support for hardware emulation on old or NEW hardware. The levels of inconsistency in HTML5 video is nuts. I've seen old machines handle it fine, yet something from past 2 years choke on it. It is a horrible, horrible spec not even remotely close to being complete.
As much as I hate W3C for their monolithic nonsense of yesterdecade, they were 100% correct when they said HTML5 wouldn't be complete until 2020~. 100% correct indeed. The amount of syntactic sugar in that spec to cater to retards that refuse to learn the language is only going to make things even slower.

It happens in loads of other languages as well.
PHP another common one. The PHP community is horribly stupid as a collective. (including ITS own developers!)
Python is another. Python suffers even more so because it is ridiculously high-overhead NATIVELY, it is horrendously slow. I have no idea why people can stand it. Even for prototyping it is bad. (more so because the syntax is horribly different from most languages)

Idiots are ruining the programming community.
They've made the entire industry horrible to live in.
If you know anyone considering programming, tell them fucking no and get in to computer science instead. Or mechatronics or something else interesting. That one in particular will be a very good one since robotics is a hugely growing industry.
Programming is a dying area. It's saturated with IDIOTS that are too lazy to learn languages, so ask "smarter" people on Stackoverflow or similar sites.
There's literally summer courses in programming that teach people to ASK questions on stackoverflow! (fucking India)

Re:No

[Pieroxy]

JavaScript is not an absolutely terrible language. It's actually a pretty good one with a lot of useful stuff. Sure, there are bad parts, nobody denies that, but every language has bad pieces that put it to shame under scrutiny.