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Comment by gsnedders | Hacker News Reader

We lost that years ago with minification. Source maps can work as well for WASM as they can for minified JS.

You seem to know a bit about web standards, was minification ever formally accepted by the W3C or did it just happen?

Just happened. It's just renaming variables and properties, after all—there's no actual change to anything standardised.

As an aside, JS is standardised by Ecma, as ECMAScript: the W3C doesn't have anything to do with it.

Then make browsers require full source maps for every website, or refuse to run them.

That’d be finally a solution.

Or require source maps by law.

EDIT: Why the downvotes? The only way to preserve the right to modify and decompile in the long term is by creating technical or legal measures enforcing it. JS was one technical measure, so now we need alternatives.

That would be awfully slow to transfer (or just verify) when most people never view the source map.

What's a "valid" source map anyways?

Furthermore, debugging with sourcemaps is suboptimal. WebAssembly wants to support much better debug information than this.

And it'd imply you need a source map even with unminified JS. And what's to say the source map maps to non-minified JS?

It’s not about debugging, it’s about the legal "right to decompile", which is intended to give customers and companies the right to take apart products and software they bought (even from competitors), and gain knowledge from that.

It’s also intended to allow them to modify it for their own purposes, and provide the modifications to others who have a license to the original product.

Especially on the web this was finally possible, and now you’re suggesting to take this away again?

I know of no country (or other jurisdiction) where a legal "right to decompile" exists.

The EU has a very, very limited right to decompile for the sake of interoperability.

See Article 6 on http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...

And for personal modifications, and so on.

And "copying the decompiled source of the part of MS Word that reads .doc files" counts as covered, so, it's quite a lot.

Especially with websites, where you might want to interact with, or write addons interacting with, WASM threatens those rights.

Many countries allow reverse engineering, and you could infer a "right to decompile" from that in some cases, but as far as I know none of them place any requirement on the source to make it easy.

At most they legally protect someone who decides to run a disassembler or decompiler on a binary from prosecution or lawsuits (but only in as much as you don't use the result to violate copyright or other restrictions).

Browsers don't create laws. WebAssembly can't legislate. This is really out of scope!

You don't seem to want a right to decompile/disassemble (which you could do in the same form for WASM than for most other languages) but a right to directly view the original source code. Such a right does not exist in general. The owners of the source code (the intellectual property) may give you the possibility to view it, but they could also decide that they don't give it to you. The only exceptions I know of are if the creator incorporates other software parts which mandate releasing the source code, e.g. GPL libraries.

> Then make browsers require full source maps for every website, or refuse to run them.

> That’d be finally a solution.

No, it wouldn't. You'd end up with sites shipping "source maps" that map every function to a randomly generated identifier.

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