Hello WebAssembly | Hacker News Reader

Hello WebAssembly

mono-project.com

189 pointsjongalloway249 comments

At the risk of getting a bunch of down-votes: Am I the only one who is afraid we are just going to turn the browser into a delivery mechanism for a bunch of fat-apps?

Anyways, the browser may become a delivery mechanism for fat-apps, but it will keep being much more than that.

* we already transpile HTML, CSS and Javascript,

* react.js keeps an entire virtual DOM,

* the web isn't going away.

And if those new fat-apps are browser independent and cross-platform it still seems like a win :)

I'm more concerned about the fat more than the app.

How will you install a webapp version of Adobe Photoshop? Will you download multi-GB every time you use it?

Some fat apps have a bootstrap that caches the core application in localstorage or some other facility. It may not be a solved problem for gigabyte sized apps.. but it is in concept a problem with a solution.

If that were the case, obviously it wouldn't work without some infrastructure changes.

But imagine an app where each function (like, say, the levels filter) was downloaded as needed and cached. That might be possible sooner rather than later.

I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why that's a non-starter. But I don't think that it's impossible to have an application of whatever complexity running in a browser... I mean, I remember when doom came out and I had a hard time running it on my machine without tweaking the configuration. And now...

I'm more concerned about being able to use things like GreaseMonkey to strip junk out of the page.

WASM is designed to implement stuff that are computationally expensive. The typical junk you want to remove is not. If somehow WASM is used to protect this junk from you filtering it, this is probably done deliberately. WebDesigners can always find ways to bother you, but you can always punish them by not visiting their website anymore.

If I am the only one punishing them out of millions of views it won't have any effect. I haven't bought an IPhone but it hasn't forced Apple to make a device I want to buy.

> I haven't bought an IPhone but it hasn't forced Apple to make a device I want to buy.

"Punish them" was not quite appropriate an expression indeed. Anyway, why should it bother you that Apple exists and continues to sell phones?

Js and WebAssembly are both quite compact, I don't think many apps will be more than 10-100 MB. Of course they may contain extra data such as images for the ui or translations in text files but those can be downloaded on the side and cached.

the thing is, these apps are already multi-GB when compiled for x86/x64 platforms.

and please, please whoever is doing it - the performance will be crap compared to instant desktop. you can't get around it. it doesn't matter how powerful PC or how fast internet connection will be. I see it on gmail with my 100 mbs connection all the time, PC being quite performant one. when it was 800 mbs nothing changed.

I can accept it in gmail/facebook/whateva where expectations are low, but for anybody doing serious work in these tools, it will be frustrating, annoying experience for foreseeable future. As an complement to desktop app (say on the roads), why not. But nothing more

At a guess there could be an initial download of the base app with the most common functions that's ~50-100MB that you can cache and then functions/plugins can be streamed in as a when you use them.

See figma.com

Also https://blog.figma.com/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-by-3...

Browsers usually maintain a cache of compiled bytecode.

Isn't that already happening? Plenty of news sites are already fat apps, when you think about how much code they load to only deliver static content and maybe support comments, very little of the code being useful to end users.

I see where you're coming from. I have, however, tested a couple of news sites (e.g. BBC, The Guardian) while using an add blocker and the results are very interesting. The "amount of news" is nowhere near the "amount of adds". Without the adds, the news websites (some; I obviously couldn't test them all...) have a decent "size" and load quick enough.

When cnn etc are wasm apps,good luck blocking ads.

Already there. I just force-refreshed Facebook and am seeing 1.8M. I've made smaller native Windows apps.

Remember the old websites that displayed all their content entirely within a Flash application? You couldn't email links, bookmark pages, parse page content with automated tools, etc. That's what I'm worried about.

Somebody is going to come up with a CMS that "compiles" websites to monstrosity WASM applications. Hopefully the types of websites I interact with won't be the kinds for whom such a horrible idea has appeal.

You can already do it, and it has been done opponent of times, with JS.

With automatic updates delivered when the vendor wants to, not when you do. And partial downloading of applications as you hit new features. And we'll need to keep track of disk use for the things...yay, browser package manager!

I see a lot of ways this could go wrong.

I'm concerned about the "fat" (especially when using high-level languages with a big runtime), but I'm quite enthusiastic about the integrated distribution- and runtime-platform the web is turning into, especially when the alternatives are closed walled-garden platforms.

There are, and will always be, websites that are ugly, fat, obtrusive and whatnot. Thing is: you don't have to visit them.

WebAssembly has the potential to say play video games, including AAA titles, without having to install anything on your computer. Same goes for many software projects such as CAD, office, video editing... You could use all this from your browser.

I don't know about you, but I find this perspective very exciting.

> WebAssembly has the potential to say play video games, including AAA titles, without having to install anything on your computer.

It depends on how you define "being installed". All files living on FileAPI and IndexedDB does not make too much difference than using direct file access and SQLite. They will be cached and they will live on your computer. Well, at least until your browser faces storage pressure and decides to randomly delete website data.

I mean, yeah, everything lives in a sandbox and there's potentially less security issues. Not having to give admin privileges to an application which allows you to build houses out of blocks is a good idea. On the other hand, the capabilities of the platform is increasing like crazy and it's just a matter of time before it converges with the operating system itself.

So, I don't know. The whole situation is weird. I think we needed better operating systems with granular permissions and we're getting there using a very convoluted way.

> I mean, yeah, everything lives in a sandbox and there's potentially less security issues.

Precisely. It's sandboxed. I very much like the idea that I could run any proprietary software inside a sandbox, and reserve "hard install" to FOSS.

Also, I just can't ignore the convenience factor.

You mean excited? With WASM-native APIs for the DOM and WebGL we can basically run full desktop apps without Javascript hacks in the browser. That's amazing.

I could even imagine something like a browser but with no HTML or DOM. With just WebGL and maybe a few other APIs you could have a really awesome app platform.

No, I firmly believe once WebAssembly gets mature, we will get Flash, Java, Silverlight, and anything else you can think of back on the browser.

It's too soon to worry about. Currently you still need to keep your UI in JavaScript / HTML / CSS so Web Assembly isn't going to be replacing that to deliver "fat apps" just yet.

Regardless, when there does come a time that WASM has full DOM access you'll just be replacing a ton of JavaScript and other code with WASM bytecode. Today you can already transpile many languages to JavaScript and some frameworks even allow you to never even touch JavaScript and still create web applications. I don't see this being much different with the exception that you'll no longer be required to used or transpile to JavaScript and this could end up faster (that's a big COULD and will probably depending on what you're doing and how).

You can also draw your own UI entirely in a canvas and only use the minimum HTML/CSS to set that up.

There (was?) a framework that does exactly this, I don't remember the name...

Tough to know exactly what you mean, but there are some UI frameworks running in WebAssembly here: http://floooh.github.io/oryol-samples/index.html

Something like http://www.zebkit.com

There's not just one.

You can run Qt apps in the browser, for instance.

React Canvas is the one I'm aware of. https://github.com/Flipboard/react-canvas

A pretty bad idea though.

Or you could just sidestep the DOM completely and render something else without JS/HTML/CSS

Now THIS is what I'm interested in. The HTML / CSS / JS triple threat has existed for, what, two decades at this point? So many other techniques have emerged for rendering GUIs and I would really love to see more exploration into this, even if it circled back to HTML / CSS / JS being the better bet I'd still highly value the experimentation.

>Am I the only one who is afraid we are just going to turn the browser into a delivery mechanism for a bunch of fat-apps

If by "just" you mean "exclusively," then no.

I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of content on the web even today isn't "webapps" but basic HTML, maybe with some JQuery or Google analytics somewhere, but more or less still just documents. Webassembly augments what can be done in the browser, but it still serves a niche set of use-cases when the whole web is considered.

Until the day comes when you can't publish anything to the web without a compiler toolchain then I wouldn't worry.

Rather:

-Encrypt web content with a hash of the current time

-Tell Ad provider that hashing method and have them serve that decryption key with each ad

-Embed a HTML renderer inside wasm which decrypts the web content and renders directly to canvas, ads included

-If Ad provider is domain blocked, mine bitcoins to pay equivalent cost of an ad click, trading the bitcoins for the decryption key

It's the end of ad block and userscripts.

Didn't that already happen?

In addition to this more "official" work on getting .NET and WebAssembly to play nicely, there is another effort to get a small .NET runtime working in the browser [1]. The demos are compelling [2].

[1] https://github.com/SteveSanderson/Blazor / https://github.com/ncave/dotnet-js

[2] https://youtu.be/MiLAE6HMr10

Some additional updates to the Blazor project here: https://github.com/aspnet/blazor-hackathon

Happy to see the example code is in F#.

Great to see Mono increasing reach. I bet that Xamarin team with MS backing will slowly make it the default tool for decent cross-platform development. C# is amazing, AoT performance rocks, there are bindings to all the native UIs.

It's also mature enough nowadays, so I'm going to use Mono for future projects.

Created an account after lurking here for 2 years to say hell yes.

Hell yes! We need mature frameworks for web apps!

Xamarin really need this. Two reason i switch from xamarin to react native. Slow compile and and cannot develope on web platform.

This got flagged as a virus on my machine

So C# works on WebAssembly but not go? :(

Days of native code are gone.

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