Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_gravity | Hacker News Reader

    The WebAssembly team decided to go with a binary
    format because that code can be compressed even
    more than the standard JavaScript text files and
    because it’s much faster for the engine to decode
    the binary format

Are there real world examples of websites where the size of the JavaScript and the time it needs to decode it make up a significant portion of the load time?

View on HN

Gmail ? Google Docs ?

And it might also be the final blow on Flash.

Did flash need a final blow? I assumed it is still around in small pockets because of projects that are abandoned and casual developers who don't intend to learn a new set of tools.

It's more pervasive and hard-to-kill than you think. At least these days we don't have project managers asking "can we add Flash?"

I have a project where downloading the JS takes about 30s on my 40Mbps home connection....

Maybe not so many "websites", but there a lot of javascript applications will benefit greatly cutting down on the size and parsing time.

Why are you serving 150MB of JavaScript??

It's become "a normal thing" to take GB-size games and compile them to asm.js. WebAssembly will absolutely make a difference.

In Unity's tests, they were able to reduce the code size of their WebGL demo from 19.0 MB of asm.js to 6.3 MB of WebAssembly code (uncompressed).

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/06/18/webgl-webassembly-and-fe...

Make this thing mainstream and, yes, there will be plenty.

Why would you compile your application into x86 code if you can compile into WebAssembly, distribute inline on your web page, and just cache it at the client's machine?

(Yes, there'll be plenty of whys. There'll also be plenty of applications for what none of the whys apply.)

Games.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com