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Comment by darpa_escapee | Hacker News Reader

My friend, where have you been for the last 5 years?

Web developers have been reinventing the wheel every 3-6 months and calling it innovation.

A fair criticism of a lot of web tech, but not of WebAssembly, which is doing many things JVM/CLR/Flash/etc. never did.

And what are those exactly? JVM and CLR bytecode is totally platform agnostic and both support many languages without trouble.

Apparently they aren't cool anymore so we need to spend another few thousand man years building another system in their image

You seriously don't see the difference between WASM and CLR/JVM ? JVM/CLR are high level and need to know about things like types/object model - this lets them do GC more efficiently and fancy stuff like reflection, etc. at

WASM is assembly level just sandboxed and portable - direct memory access and basic instructions - it doesn't even have GC right now.

They are only superficially similar.

So here's a thought: how is this different from PNaCL and friends?

Conceptually not very different, practically PNaCL has a problem of being an ad-hoc standard based on LLVM - WASM fixes that.

PNaCl, IIRC, doesn't expose web APIs, but requires message-passing to and from associated JS for that.

> And what are those exactly?

Providing a lower-level platform; directly exposing open web APIs. The first may not seem like an advantage, but it means more flexibility in the higher level systems (including runtimes like JVM or CLR, if you wanted to) that can be usefully run on top of it.

But they don't support the primary reason for asm.js and thus wasm- C and C++.

They also, as you note in another comment, do not have the appropriate security model for web apps.

I guess you never did any .NET development.

.NET 1.x introduced Managed C++.

.NET 2.0 replaced Managed C++ with C++/CLI due to feedback from C++ devs, regarding keywords and how GC types were declared. C++/CLI was submitted to ANSI C++ as standard proposal.

UWP introduced C++/CX, although it does compile to native code and interoperates with .NET Native instead.

Or Flash for that matter, which had a C++ compiler called FlasCC.

I am well aware of managed C++ and C++/CLI. They are not the same language as native C++, in the sense that matters for WebAssembly's target audience.

C++/CX is closer, but a) also still not the same language and b) doesn't run on the CLR, so isn't an argument for replacing wasm with IL.

5 years? All years, actually.

smaller ideas faster, zestierly

Amazingly, "zestier.ly" has not yet been registered.

oooh, it's like agile, but lightweight.

"micro" if you will

Seems like a waste of time.

Maybe if we had a JS framework for reinventing the wheel...

You mean Wheel.js? It's crap. RollCircle is 1000x better, and it's got a flexable plugin layer that works with Angular, Ember, or Asm.js.

RollCircle is too complicated. I already learned Wheel.js two years ago, and don't want to relearn the wheel.

I prefer ReWheel. It's like RollCircle but they've reduced everything to a single wheel so it's easier to reason about. Some people still think you shouldn't have a single global wheel but it's definitely where things are headed.

Anyways you should take a look, it's a lot easier to pick up than RollCircle and nobody really uses Wheel.js anymore

Modern developers want more variety. I've been working on something new:

npm elipse.js

It's based on circle, but I'm still working out some issues.

I tried to install but I'm getting an error message: "undefined" is "undefined" on line 27361 in elipse.min.js . I'll send you the stacktrace because it's bigger than the message limit here. I see that you're transpiling typescript into ES2015 then down to ES5 in Babel, cool. Could I get a source map for the original file?

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