Comment by kalcode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kalcode | Hacker News Reader

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This is a pretty ridiculous response. There have been compiled languages way before interpreter/jit ones and these didn't halt the advancement of programming and programming communities, especially the sharing code and ideas part.

Also you shouldn't need access to code to create your own solution. Many people have been reverse engineering or borrowing from ideas in the compiled world. When I copy something I like I don't typically look at their code, I focus on the functionality and break down what its doing so i can reimplement it.

The fact you are focusing on centralization is basically saying "i can't steal someone eases code". The web promised to be free and open and that had nothing to do with whether or not you could read the javascript.

Most modern javascript on site is rather unreadable due to being transpiled anyways. There is still an option to use plain javascript instead of WASM. Just like now you can use plain javascript instead of transpiling it.

Companies can develop big, bulky WASM-only framework with graphic primitives & so on, very much like Java applets, and effectively kill the openness of the web standards.

> have been reverse engineering

Reverse engineering some HTML is not difficult. Minified JS is much more difficult. A 50MB blob of WAMS is just too time consuming.

> The web promised to be free and open and that had nothing to do with whether or not you could read the javascript.

On the contrary, making it 100x times more difficult to understand what a website is doing is terrible for security, compatibility, inclusiveness (good luck making a braille terminal for WASM-only websites or using them on a very slow uplink)

>The web promised to be free and open and that had nothing to do with whether or not you could read the javascript.

This had and has everything to do with it. Please, read what you have just written, and think.

There are people that lobby for closed source and distribute closed source, and there are people that lobby for floss and libre software. And then there are hypocrites.

Mozilla is bathing itself in it's image of standing for a free and open world. The truth is that it's business in "The Web" is creating the groundwork for a closed and non-free world. This hypocrisy cries out deafening.

Mozilla is also realising that the web needs to compete with native apps as well. Note that it's even easier to hide the source of native apps.

(Furthermore, many apps that would use WASM probably have a significant server-side part as well that is not necessarily open source.)

At least native applications are something static you can verify. With web 'apps' like, say, anything based on electron, the end user has no control about what code is run. Instead the 'app' just pulls down and runs whatever the company/etc wants you to run dynamically and differently every time with the permissions you gave originally.

Your mention of Electron is the perfect example of why this is no different for native apps. Of course, on mobile this is usually mitigated through app stores, but there is no reason similar mechanisms could be introduced for the web if this really turns out to be problematic.

Electron is not a native app. Electron is a browser web app marketed as a native application.

The only reason it's got all those permissions is because it is a native app, which can claim all those permissions. Sure, Electron app are browser wep apps marketed as a native application, but by definition, native apps can do everything Electron apps can do.

Chrome browser is only 50% of Electron. The other 50% is a complete nodejs distribution which allows access to the OS filesystem, network, anything Java or .NET can do on a desktop... So no, it's not just a browser web app. Electron is absolutely native to the OS is runs on.

A language being compiled or not has nothing to do with the web being free.

Like I said we can already pretty much transpile our code to practically speaking, an unreadable state.

Companies can already choose to make their code closed source and transpile it. If there goal is to make it more closed they can do that now.

WASM doesn't change that. People can still make their code open source, they can still write in plain javascript. Its really no different. Instead we are giving people options and the ability to have more performant apps in the ones that require it.

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