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Comment by batmansmk | Hacker News Reader

Impossible to comprehend and pointless. Is it a chatgpt generated article?

There's a lot of complexity in using WebAssembly, but I thought this article did a good job of focusing on one specific point of confusion: why there are multiple compile targets, and what the difference between emscripten and WASI are.

wrong, there is no complexity

    clang --target=wasm32

That's it, you target WASM

People somewhere decided that it was too easy and went ahead to bloat everything with Emscripten, WASI and the like

Here is all you need to know to target WASM: https://schellcode.github.io/webassembly-without-emscripten

The only target for WASM is the browser, everything else is just bloat and a waste of energy

WASI and Emscripten exist because people want to write code that interacts with the outside world. Your approach is fine if you just want to call into some math functions and are ok writing your own bindings, but that’s not how most people use wasm.

A weird thing is that ChatGPT definition is vacuous -- there is maybe one meaningful word in this sentence:

In software development, a platform target triple (also known as a "target triple") is a string that specifies the target platform for which a piece of software is built.

And then he writes the definition below that:

This platform target triple specifies the CPU, vendor, and platform/OS that you're targeting.

Why quote ChatGPT? Just delete that sentence, and the article is better.

Huh, weird, I thought the exact same thing when I hit the summary. Something in the wording feels like ChatGPT answered a “explain the difference between Emscripten and WASI” prompt.

The thing is that this article is written more like a little note like "don't forget this is that and that other thing works like this" and less like a full news article with an introductory segment.

I agree. I think he should write a separate article on what he wants to say.

Who/whatever wrote this article was fed with five year old information and does not even mention interface types or the component model.

Meta: Did HN change the karma requirements to flag articles?

The information is still relevant to someone who wants to ship wasm code today. AFAIK no browser supports the component model, and interface types never made it past proposal stage in favor of the component model.

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