Comment by rfinney | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rfinney | Hacker News Reader

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Webassembly is linkable: https://webassembly.org/docs/dynamic-linking/ in the dynamic linking sense.

WebAssembly enables load-time and run-time (dlopen) dynamic linking in the MVP by having multiple instantiated modules share functions, linear memories, tables and constants using module imports and exports. In particular, since all (non-local) state that a module can access can be imported and exported and thus shared between separate modules’ instances, toolchains have the building blocks to implement dynamic loaders.

The code is fetched via URLs so you can link to it in that sense, too.

It's also cacheable: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Caching...

I believe the parent comment was referring to hyperlinks, not dynamic linking.

The point was more that once webpages become applications running on the client (think single page apps), the natural document metaphor of web pages and the tooling built on it (hyperlinks, forward/back, bookmarks, history) falls apart unless you do extra work to ensure that experience is maintained.

the natural document metaphor of web pages and the tooling built on it (hyperlinks, forward/back, bookmarks, history) falls apart unless you do extra work to ensure that experience is maintained

But not everything needs to be a document. Sometimes the thing you're working with really is an application and not a document.

To me, one of the biggest problems with the current web is that we've commingled "app stuff" and "document stuff" so badly that browsers have been forced to become a shitty, inferior X-server (or Operating System outright), instead of being really good browsers. Browsers for browsing is great... browsers as a UI remoting protocol, is a bit janky.

ah. thanks.

"clickable"

Because you certainly can link to the wasm and js code that come with webassembly instantiateables.

I think the GP means "links" as in "clickable links", not "binary linker/loader".

I think he meant linkable in the web sense, ie, hyperlinks.

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