<story><title>An Abridged Cartoon Introduction To WebAssembly</title><url>https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/05/abridged-cartoon-introduction-webassembly/#</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwasehasdwi</author><text>Realistically, as soon as WASM is a good alternative to JS a good part of websites won&amp;#x27;t use a single line of JS.&lt;p&gt;Regardless of arguments for and against whether this is a good idea, market pressure to open floodgates to other languages will be far too high to ignore.&lt;p&gt;My prediction is that WASM will quickly evolve into a new way to containerize applications, very close to a full-fledged VM&amp;#x2F;OS. The market constantly demands more features and faster execution. The only logical conclusion is that the web browser will become an operating system.</text></item><item><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></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gavinpc</author><text>People could be perfectly happy with today&amp;#x27;s performance levels (or tomorrow&amp;#x27;s, or yesterday&amp;#x27;s) if the prevailing systems were designed to serve and empower them, rather than to exploit them.&lt;p&gt;The market &lt;i&gt;wants people to want&lt;/i&gt; &amp;quot;more features and faster execution.&amp;quot;  The market doesn&amp;#x27;t care what it&amp;#x27;s selling &lt;i&gt;per se&lt;/i&gt;.  If the web-browser-as-OS seems like an inevitability in that context, it&amp;#x27;s only a side-effect, and one that could change at any time.&lt;p&gt;WASM also impacts the labor market, as you mention.  But it&amp;#x27;s not, as we might like to believe, because programmers&amp;#x27; demands for more freedom and expressive power are being honored; it&amp;#x27;s because, as monkmartinez suggests [0] (and maybe this is what you mean by &amp;quot;floodgates&amp;quot;), companies would rather not be limited to a smaller human-resource pool when developing web properties.&lt;p&gt;If I sound a little dystopian, it might be because I&amp;#x27;m currently reading &lt;i&gt;Cyber-Marx&lt;/i&gt; [1], an insightful book from 1999 about the &amp;quot;information revolution&amp;quot; and its relation to capital.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=14342983&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=14342983&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.press.uillinois.edu&amp;#x2F;books&amp;#x2F;catalog&amp;#x2F;66mwg3pc9780252067952.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.press.uillinois.edu&amp;#x2F;books&amp;#x2F;catalog&amp;#x2F;66mwg3pc9780252...&lt;/a&gt;</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><item><author>throwasehasdwi</author><text>Realistically, as soon as WASM is a good alternative to JS a good part of websites won&amp;#x27;t use a single line of JS.&lt;p&gt;Regardless of arguments for and against whether this is a good idea, market pressure to open floodgates to other languages will be far too high to ignore.&lt;p&gt;My prediction is that WASM will quickly evolve into a new way to containerize applications, very close to a full-fledged VM&amp;#x2F;OS. The market constantly demands more features and faster execution. The only logical conclusion is that the web browser will become an operating system.</text></item><item><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></item></parent_chain><comment><author>monkmartinez</author><text>I wholeheartedly agree with your statements. I think there are a legion of developers who would love to program for the web, but refuse to learn|use and simply can not keep up with JS.&lt;p&gt;The browser is one of the only truly cross platform development environments around. The popularity of the browser is directly coupled to that fact in my opinion. How many developers|companies and organizations would be over the moon excited with hiring a Python|Ruby|Lua|Rust|C# developer that could talk natively to the browser? My guess is a LOT.</text></comment>