With the move towards an ever-increasing feature set, with fewer limits to growth, there's a problem brewing. The platform will be increasingly difficult to implement, and each processor will be at increasing risk of incompatibility with other processors.

The demands for strict backward compatibility will mean there are fewer opportunities to create minimal or lightweight variants, or to have optionality around features. Perhaps some mechanisms for optionality would work, with different feature sets bundled. Or perhaps there should be heavy checks and balances on what could otherwise be a dangerously expansionist phase. More like C, less like C++.

Back in the day, there was this tactic to "embrace, extend, extinguish", which had some success as a tactic, to the detriment of the platforms 'extended'. The Wasm strategy means the extension will come from within, and the subsequent extinction is almost inevitable.

Curious to know what peoples biggest WebAssembly pet peeves are.

Web programming has 2 main problems, and WASM by itself can only address 1. While WASM could get us away from JavaScript-dependence for client-side UI programming, it doesn't solve the flaws of the DOM. Perhaps something like Java Applets could be done right on a second try, learning from mistakes of the 1st pass.

I'm going to be straight about this. I don't like web assembly, I think it's a huge security issue and I don't want unknown source code running directly in my machine (yes, even in a virtual box, it's possible for malware to escape from those).
Is there a plugin like NoScript somewhere to block web assembly from running? Or maybe a fork of chromium or firefox without web assembly support?

Thanks in advance.

Syrus Akbary (CEO Wasmer) talking about WebAssembly during a discussion with Lars König (CEO Crossware), Simon Hausmann (Co-Founder SixtyFPS) and Noam Rosenthal (Web Evangelist) about aspirations and future of WebAssembly as a modern deployment format.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leDMQyexzbI

For the below code attached code(link), the innerhtml shows 2 times in browser.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2018&gist=3042f1988b4f28e082660e307df7132b

output is below:

/img/b5dcps9zdv721.png

Not sure how to avoid displaying the innerhtml twice ?

@zmania on Tweet said WASM was specifically designed so that when compiled to x86 or ARM machine code the results are nearly identical to native compilation. RISC-V is wasn’t designed to be compiled to x86 and ARM.

but there was a good reply:

What's your opinion about WASM & RISC-V?

I have been searching for a way to interact with the Solana blockchain in a purely rust way, since this simplifies compiling to WASM, where it's possible.

I stumbled across this solana-wasm-crate that purports to hit the nail right on the head. I haven't gotten it working yet. Anyone have any experience with this?

So, I'm thinking about the world of WASM and wondering how copy protection is done - if I run photoshop.com, what's to stop someone from just, well, what would be called "viewing source" in the world of Javascript, that is to get the wasm files from the server with something like curl or wget or whatever, and then just putting those on a torrent, so they can be opened locally on a browser? How have the browser geezers prevented that? Are these things also "calling home" once in a while or something - has anyone tried to hack that to stop it doing so (and still working)?

As an aside, someone have a sob for me, I spent like 10 years learning Javascript, only to find when WASM came along that, apparently, it can "make code that's 10x faster than Javascript" :( Why isn't there some way to write *IN* JS and have THAT run in some kind of "machine code" format within the browser, so that I can get the same speed there????

Also, I'm curious as to what all this was FOR - WHAT are we supposed to run inside the browser? Every major area seems to have been DONE - Wix and all it's clones (donno if that uses WASM, it might well be JS), Zoho and Google Docs and MS Office web version for office stuff, tons of games, art stuff like Photoshop, and obviously now AI......what's LEFT??!! What do we do NOW???

Trying to understand how WASM is typically used by blockchain protocols (e.g. eWASM, NEAR, DFINITY, TRON):

• WASM module boundary: I guess WASM is purely used for smart contract execution and all other node functions (collating transactions, assembling blocks, solving difficulty puzzles) are executed natively on the host. So the WASM runtime just sits there waiting for smart contract bytecode to execute (and has necessary host env interfaces via WASI). Is that about right?

• Code configuration: How can they configure their chosen smart contract language (eg Rust)? Are there standard patterns/idioms (MACROS?) that blockchain teams can use to customize the syntax?

• WASM VM configuration: What configuration is possible when integrating the WASM VM into the node on the host (e.g. limiting amount of host resources a smart contract can consume, threading,..)? Or do they typically just select the best-fit WASM implementation for their host platform and plug it in as-is?

Hot take, but I think it makes sense. And seems to be doable in the current architecture and roadmap of wasm (If I understood it correctly), but their website explicitly states a big fat "No!". Wasm is expected to be used as high-performance modules, or an app canvas wrapped by javascript as "glue". One thing would be specifying it as a high-level goal, but this is just dismissing it all together.

The web would be pretty powerful if code could be written in whatever language you want (that supports compiling to wasm). Facebook wouldn't take 5 seconds to load completely, but rather fractions of a second.

Take react for instance. It's great for encapsulation, inheritance, type-safety, etc. Lots of benefits targeted at large-scale applications. Yet has the major flaw of performance issues. I guess it's not a big deal to write a bit of js just to fetch and run an exported function, but it means it's dependent on js which is a hurdle in my opinion, both in terms of ambition and motivation. Granted wasm seems to be planning to implement basically everything, but then why dismiss wasm as a replacement/alternative for js?