<story><title>An Abridged Cartoon Introduction To WebAssembly</title><url>https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/05/abridged-cartoon-introduction-webassembly/#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>IvanK_net</author><text>They often forget to mention, that WebAssembly is just a low-level programming language (much lower than C), it has extremely simple syntax (it has just four data types, no system calls, the specification takes 5 pages instead of 500 pages of C spec). You may call it a &amp;quot;bytecode&amp;quot;, but typical bytecodes also have around-500-page specifications.&lt;p&gt;Also, its relation to javascript is not any bigger than the relation to any other programming language (i.e. there is no relation). A WebAssembly VM could be made as an extension of any environment.&lt;p&gt;I recommend reading the official paper &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WebAssembly&amp;#x2F;spec&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;pldi2017.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;WebAssembly&amp;#x2F;spec&amp;#x2F;blob&amp;#x2F;master&amp;#x2F;papers&amp;#x2F;pldi2...&lt;/a&gt; (I learned more than about 50 &amp;quot;essays&amp;quot; that I read about WASM in the past).</text></comment>
<story><title>An Abridged Cartoon Introduction To WebAssembly</title><url>https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/05/abridged-cartoon-introduction-webassembly/#</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gavinpc</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m of two minds about WASM.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s the Alan Kay attitude that we can build entire systems on top of minimal VM&amp;#x27;s, rather than sacrificing power to bake in more facilities.  But even he says that too much time has been wasted by teams reinventing the wheel (or flat tire) who didn&amp;#x27;t really have the chops to do it.&lt;p&gt;The other side of that, then, is the great potential for interop that Javascript offers.  We now have a worldwide platform with a built-in presentation layer and a highly-optimized interpreter with useful, reflectable data structures out of the box. (&lt;i&gt;edit&lt;/i&gt; i.e. it&amp;#x27;s a viable platform for metaprogramming... the endgame of which is JS-in-JS (see &amp;quot;prepack&amp;quot;)).&lt;p&gt;I would love to see a future in which the browser (and &amp;quot;personal&amp;quot; computer generally) remained a locus of significant computation.  In practice, I suspect that highly-intensive tasks (mostly AI stuff) will continue to be done on servers, not because we lack the processing power, but because end users will have signed away the custody of all data worth processing.  If that is the case, then WASM&amp;#x27;s role will be to fill a fairly marginal gap, between what JS can do, and what has to be farmed out anyway.&lt;p&gt;So ultimately I hope that WASM offers a lifeline to the computing power that individuals still have.  But given the state of JS (after huge investments), it feels like starting over again.</text></comment>