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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, I'm excited about performance improvements. On the other, I lament the fact that this will kill one of the best parts of the web: the fact that the source is sent to the end user instead of a binary. It now makes the code and how it works opaque, thus killing the spirit of innovation and learning.

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Agreed. But I've felt that way about minified JS for a long time too. I'm not sure there's a way around it.

This is the same situation we're already in with minification. The debugger can reformat or decompile it, and if you have source maps you'll see the original source, even if the original source wasn't even javascript.

I agree with the others under this comment that websites already hide their source through obfuscation. What I am slightly more concerned is how this will go with the law. I think it is much harder to get into trouble when messing with obfuscated JS than when decompiling binary code.

Yes, you can get into trouble when you decompile code: http://security.stackexchange.com/a/30375/93013

The specifics of how this will work are not totally clear to me, but web assembly will have a text format that will be human readable and editable according to:

[0] http://webassembly.org/

[1] http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/#will-webassembly-support-vi...

It will have a text format (or more than one), but yea probably it will be less readable:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/TextFormat...

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