On Tuesday, 1 November 2016 at 06:04:41 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
On Monday, 31 October 2016 at 09:52:55 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
On 10/30/2016 06:35 PM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
But what I meant was LLVM will have a wasm backend.
Yes, but it is developed so slowly and conservatively, that
coming up with own proof-of-concept backend may be a chance to
win early interest. They may speed up greatly though when
WebAssembly design gets closer to MVP stage, but I am checking
that regularly.
I was disappointed that after early hype it all went quiet for
now.
Actually, they have moved one with browser previews and dedicated
web site jsut as we were talking: http://webassembly.org
I am curious how much attention it will gather on i.e. reddit
But right now it is mostly irrelevant because runtime
requirements have not been defined in WebAssembly at all, only
low level byte code stuff. It is all in very early stages
really.
You have looked into it more than me at a low level, but how is
it possible then to run an app today in nightly browser in wasm?
How it works right now is that you can use WebAssembly byte-code
to write a JavaScript-exposed function to be called from plain
JavaScript. See http://webassembly.org/docs/js . Thus most of
runtime level stuff is actually done by JS.
There are further plans to expose browser GC inside WebAssembly,
allow direct usage of browser API like DOM and generally make
possible to use it with no JavaScript at all - but those are all
out of scope of MVP milestone.
Taking a step back, it's quite amusing how much ingenuity goes
into having to avoid writing Javascript...
Judging by focus points in public statements one can reason that
actually main driving goal of WebAssembly developers is not to
throw away JavaScript but to make existing JavaScript/asm.js code
more efficient (by pre-compiling it on server and distributing in
binary form).
At the same time such initiative is of great value to company
like Google who has lost "better JS" competition (remember Dart
language?) to Microsoft TypeScript. Having common ground in form
of byte code supported by all browsers will in some way reset the
competition again.
