WebAssembly

[Lyberta]

Oh, there's been some new programming threads and I'm gonna chime in on the stuff I'm excited about: WebAssembly.

Wait, wait! It's not just a browser gimmick! Despite the name, the core spec has nothing to do with the browser. It's just a portable "assembly" language that runs in VM. And "assembly" means it doesn't have slow BS like garbage collection, it can map to hardware efficiently. Which means you can run your native code written in C/C++/Rust/Go/Swift/whatever and it will work without much overhead in the spec.

So why am I excited for WebAssembly? Because we can now dump stupid and slow scripting languages in our game engines and use sane and fast ones. No more Lua, no more Python, no more QuakeC (ugh)! And if the game engine provides WASM bindings, it means that "scripts" can be written in any language that can be compiled to WASM. People can still keep using their favorite language and not be forced into arbitrary ones. This is pretty amazing.

...and hopefully JavaScript will die when WASM will have access to browser. About time.

[Julius]

Yes it does sound quite interesting, looking forward to test some actual projects (re-)build with it. Maybe this will be able to speed up some web-apps written in Python or Ruby. Lets see

[Lyberta]

Found this. I guess if you want Lua and other languages, you can get pretty much any language at this point.

[drummyfish]

Never looked into it but when I first heard about WA my immediate thought was it's purpose was to allow proprietary binary-only programs on web and further enslaving users by moving everything to the "cloud" and SASS. Whatever the purpose, I still think the web has died when web pages became programs instead of documents, now it's gonna be just a little more fucked up web.

[Lyberta]

Tbh I don't care much about "Web" part of WebAssembly. I agree that "WebAssembly" is a horrible name. It should be called "Portable Assembly". Although "JavaScript" is way more horrible name because it has nothing to do with Java. What I care about is common and standardized bytecode I can compile my C++ programs into and then run in VM on any hardware.

With WASI it is only a matter of time before we get operating system where userland is 100% WASM and we can forget about compiling our programs to specific arch.

[drummyfish]

Isn't that just Java then?

[Lyberta]

Isn't that just Java then?

You can think of it as Java Virtual Machine (not Java language) but much simpler because it doesn't have stuff like garbage collection and classes.

[Ntech]

I'm very interested in how WebAssembly turns out -- it's very promising.

[Julius]

https://github.com/mbasso/awesome-wasm