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apexalpha

What the hell. This feels basically native?!

I had no idea WebAssembly was this far developed. This feels like electron in reverse, and GOOD.

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What's your environment? It feels like incredibly poor performance for me (Firefox on macOS)

Firefox 97 on Ubuntu 20.04.

It took a while to load, but the site is probably seeing heavy loads. But afterwards it feels like a native application.

Smooth for me in Firefox on linux too. Maybe check about:support to see if there's any graphics driver issue?

Is Electron the baseline to compare to these days, instead of an actual native app?

I meant Electron brought webapps to the Desktop. Now Web Assembly seems to bring native apps to the browser.

So the next step would be to write "electron-browserify.js" which emulates a JS runtime in browser so you can run Electron apps remote.

I'm sure there's a relevant XKCD somewhere.

I can’t really remember who but some months ago a coding scratchpad website launched full virtualized Linux environments in the browser through WASM, you could run Node on it.

Well someone has already got WebKit to run in WASM[1] so hey, maybe it’s not that far off :D

[1]: https://github.com/trevorlinton/webkit.js

Next step is bring native apps to the desktop. Then we'll be cookin'

Define "this far".

The toolchains for webassembly are still not trivial to use.

I wish more work was done to support WASM, but it requires a lot of work from compiler developers, for each language backend, so it's still a lot of work.

Not to mention that I have almost no clue how to debug a WASM build.

WASM is clearly the future, but I don't think there is any company really spending money to write better WASM tools, and you can be sure WASM is against the interests of google, apple, microsoft etc.

Why is it against the interests of large tech companies? I get Apple, but Google is always pretty eager about the advancement of the web platform, see Chrome and Chrome OS.

Microsoft was once super scared of Java because it could have filled the role that WASM and desktop browser apps now try to break into. Microsoft tried EEE, but Sun bit back.

Google is happy with most anything you do on the internet, as long as you do it in Chrome so they can watch.

I’d say it’s more about Google search being the front door of the internet to most people, so while internet usage is high so is Googles revenue.

> Not to mention that I have almost no clue how to debug a WASM build.

I've got you covered: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/wasm-debugging-2020/ (TL;DR use Chrome DevTools with the official DWARF integration)

It's completely frozen for me (after downloading), but it's very cool for sure

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