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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

This is short-sighted enough to border on shit-posting.

So the only thing people want to do with WASM is deploy C/C++ to the browser and for raw speed?

There's many other reasons you would want to use WASM...you might want to use languages with better tooling or better suited to the purpose of your code (I'd rather do UIs in Lua than JS 10 times out of 10). Maybe you want a tiny memory footprint so you can run on small devices. The list goes on.

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Those are the two main things it's currently suitable for. People who haven't looked at it have too crazy expectations for it. It's not some magic run all languages thing like GraalVM/Truffle it gives you a way to run a restricted subset of machine instructions.

I'd be extremely careful calling a computer science professor's opinion shit-posting. He's basing his argument on end-user experience. You, on the other hand, are giving dev-experience more weightage. Depending on what you want, WASM may or may not be useful.

For a scientist, he does a piss-poor job of producing open, reproducible research. He doesn't even show numbers. Whatever his credentials may be, this post is all talk without even a nugget of actual data or information. So yes, it borders on shit-posting. We have to expect better from a CS professor

Yeah - in a way it's worse that the article is so lacking in detail because you expect the evidence to be present as a base-line level of competency for a person with such a position. We certainly shouldn't be appealing to authority, at any rate.

Just because someone has a respectable credential or title does not mean that they don't like to troll sometimes, or worse (nb: no accusations are being made here), have a vested interest in opposition.

People, for reasons we don't know, understand or maybe without reason at all, put their professional reputations on the line all the time. Most of the time it goes by unnoticed.

But a lot of other languages with better tooling et al just choose to compile to JavaScript. It's not like you need WASM for that.

But why use JavaScript engine as the “base”? Why not a more “general” VM?

WASM just skips the JS to JIT compiled bytecode - correct me if I’m wrong. Creating a standardized bytecode for distribution that other languages can compile to.

No reason to continue to shackle the web to JavaScript.

Here is a pretty good explanations of the WASM roadmap and why they want certain things.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/webassemblys-post-mvp-futu...

I'm no expert, but I think one issue is the lack of a GC in WASM. So each language have to roll their own custom GC on top of it.

Another reason is JS already has many high level features. Which might make it easier to implement similar ones in your language if you target JS directly.

The last reason I can think of is interop with existing JS code and the DOM.

These things are on the roadmap atm.

Better WASM/JS interop is on the way, though atleast on Firefox nightly you can get this for fairly low cost for some functions.

GC is also on the todo list and IIRC might get an early preview in Firefox Nightly.

Once the GC is done, DOM integration will happen, people are eager for that and that would eliminate a lot of the necessary JS glue code.

A GC for wasm is planned, as is DOM/browser API interop.

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