Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

As amazing as webassembly is, I feared this day. This is the day when we are no longer able to examine the source code that our browsers are running.

View on HN

You can easily view the webassembly file as part of the website source, so what you're saying is a bit misleading IMO. I don't see this being different than minified Javascript.

Isn’t that no different than saying, “you can disassemble an exe, so you can still see what it’s doing!” While not untrue, it’s not very helpful.

Although, webassembly is closer to .NET’s CIL. It’s still a form of assembly, but it’s a bit higher level which makes decompiling a bit easier than, say, an optimized (-O3) desktop program.

No I don't think that's a fair comparison, in this case downloading the WebAssembly file is trivial and much more accessible to the average user.

Not much different from minified Javascript though.

The License page has links to all the used open source projects at least:

https://www.tejotron.com/thirdparty.html

Well JavaScript isn't going to see any more leaps in performance, and people write slower JavaScript than they wrote yesterday, on average, so it must be remediated somehow.

And until a lot of people realize that most web technologies are fundamentally bad, things are not going to get better.

We are not going to be using this same web tech in 300 years, almost certainly, so at some point it's going to change. It won't be soon, because people love tradition, even when it causes them pain.

So, for now, it's webassembly time.

> people write slower JavaScript than they wrote yesterday, on average

This is only true because computers are faster than they were yesterday, on average. People don't optimize code to some arbitrary absolute level, they optimize code that's slow on their computer.

You can still read the source code to all the interfaces webassembly has access to.

“Fear comes from the lack of knowledge and a state of ignorance. The best remedy for fear is to gain knowledge.” ― Debasish Mridha.

this is scary, shouldn't there be a way in which we can ship source code (maybe compressed) with the wasm stuff?

How is this scarier than any other software you use but haven't seen the source code to? I don't understand. Unless you've never used software your ENTIRE LIFE, and no one has used any software on your behalf, you have been subject to closed source software.

I'm not saying that this ideal, or even good. I'm asking why it's only scary NOW.

    > How is this scarier than any other software you
    > use but haven't seen the source code to?

The only code on my computer that I do not have the source code to are the JetBrains IDEs and Kerbal Space Program. With both of those companies I have a financial relationship, and both those companies earned my trust, and their software I have to download and install explicitly.

Contrast with webassembly where there is no trust between the entity running the code on my computer, no realistic way for the average user to consent to having code run on their system, and no reason for them to earn trust.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/So...

I strongly disagree and despise this kind of thinking. Don't get me wrong, OSS is awesome for tooling (shared by many creative professionals) but not for end products. An architect's tools can be open source, but an architect's plan is their own creative output that should not be open source if we make this analogy. Architects can get together and build better tooling for the benefit of all architects - OSS shines here.

This project is a creative output. Stop for a second with entitlement to the source code and just enjoy for what it is and how amazing this project is.

Do you go to museums and ask for what color palette the artist used? It's missing the point, isn't it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com