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Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

"WASM

5.1 has a preliminary support for WASM. You can enable it via the flag --expose_wasm in d8. Alternatively you can try out the WASM demos with Chrome 51 (Beta Channel)."

The future is coming fast.

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Y but how long will it take to get to the point where enough users have browsers that support WASM ? 10 years?

Even if that's the case, I hope to still be a developer in 10 or 15 years from now, and I'm betting people will still be using the internet then too.

Yep just wish things could move along faster :)

Yes we do. But that only happens with technology dictatorships. And we've seen where that leads.

There will be a polyfill for unsupported browsers. It should be easy to convert most, if not all wasm to asm.js, which can be executed by any browser with typed arrays

It took WebGL about 4 years to spread, the reason it took so long was in hardware (GPU, drivers ...). Wasm is just CPU-related, I believe it can reach most of the people within a year.

Pouplar browsers get updated quite often. And those, which got updated rarely, became unpopular. Everything will be fine, I think :)

One of the major drags on WebGL was a lack of iOS support. Once that was in place there was an explosion in usage. I suspect we'll see the same here.

WebGL still sucks on mobiles.

90% of the time someone puts a link to some WebGL demo on HN or Reddit I either don't get it running at all, or get single digit FPS after the mobile turned into oven mode.

These days software is mostly auto-updating so at least in the US and other first world countries, relatively soon. The rest of the world is where we'll be lacking. :/

I think the question we all should really be asking is how long will it take to get to the point where WASM is practically useful for anything that noticeable chunk of web users cares about.

Nearly every browser is "evergreen" these days, meaning they auto-update. Chrome, Firefox, and Edge all update often and automatically. Mobile browsers also have this benefit due to being distributed via an app store. This percentage is always going up, but even now is a significant percent (the exact number I'm not sure).

What this means is that web standards can move significantly faster than in the past. Interesting new technologies like WASM can be implemented and tested without waiting 5-6 years anymore. Very exciting to see as a web developer.

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