Will Web Assembly Kill JavaScript?

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[sludgeman]

The cause of the actual frontend chaos is caused by the lack of competition for js. The programming languages war wasn't possible in browsers since there was a js monopoly so developers started to create frameworks and libraries and start Ember vs Angular vs React vs Vue fights. If it were possible to include translate most programming languages to code readable by browsers so anyone could use his favorite programming language, this absurd frontend 3 frameworks per year fad would end

[TheOlian]

Hopefully this works out. This would revolutionize the web.

[aaronchamberlain]

I wanted to clarify a few things to your viewers if they see this now several months later. Please do not think of WebAssembly as a replacement to JS. It is designed to complement JS by doing anything that JS does too slowly. WebAssembly has direct call backs to and from JS. So yes, one of the biggest places you'll see a benefit is in WebGL rendering, but there are numerous other places to drop it in.

So for example, I'm already using it in production. I have a web app that analyzes DNA data sets for research Universities. Some of the files that my users upload are CSV files with 75K+ rows and 10 columns. I do all kinds of resequencing, math, and sorting on this data. It got to a point where it was absolutely too slow to do in the browser so I had to set up a complicated back end where the user uploaded the file, it went to my cloud servers where I crunched in Hadoop, etc. As soon as WASM went stable, I tried to see if I could get my math algorithms down low again. I managed to get it down to about ~3.5 seconds. So that's what I did. I got rid of all my fancy backend servers, and simply tossed a loading screen up while they waited the short amount of time. So you can imagine a few different places where even a ~0.5 second speed up will mean the world to your users.

[WolfersHD]

I dig the idea of abstractions that allow you to program in whatever language you please. I don't think anything's going to replace js unless we make an immediate shift to vr, which isn't happening.

[whome]

I wish there was something between coding bootcamp and college

[nicknapoli]

I will have to look into this more. I have heard of it a few times, but it would be nice to be able to compile right down to machine code to execute apps directly in a browser.

[paulperkins]

Web Assembly is not supposed to replace JavaScript. What it is supposed to do is make all other programming languages as portable as JavaScript. But not as inefficient as JavaScript.

[GmoneyMozart]

Fuck...I just started to learn how to code and I started with JavaScript...lol

[andrealmar]

so basically we would be able to use WebAssembly API to manipulate behavior on browsers using our preferred language instead of JavaScript?

[bhargavachow]

Going to web assembly might not fully replace JS. So, do we need a GPU to run these heavy graphics or will these web assemble utilize CPU

[MrDaAsif]

I hope that with WASM we'll start seeing JavaScript frameworks use backends in WASM and just using a JS interface, web apps across the board should benefit from this.

That is, if a JavaScript has some kind of algorithm, it could be implemented in WASM.

I hope the WASM <-> JS interface doesn't have a bad overhead, because many languages/libraries will use C libraries as backends for algorithms.

[LorenzoJimenez]

Nice! Thanks Chris. Y learn something new!

[whatamievendoing]

This is awesome... You just got a whole bunch of credibility as far as I'm concerned because I didn't know about this!

[kumarthangudu]

Hey Chris, what do you think of wasmer.io ?

[vmbo]

WebAssembly is just a way to enable closed source client apps. They will write an app in any language and then convert it to WebAssembly, making it nearly impossible to read. If they will stream parts of WebAssembly to the client which executes it immediately, it will be even harder to fully reconstruct/reverse engineer what's going on. This could be very very bad for the open web. They're selling you this as a fun performance tool(look at the fast game!) but they will use it to protect their properties.

[piq-dgvz]

web assembly wont be just for graphics. it would make those dom diffing algorithms so much effecient.

[SHONNER]

In the past, all the good online 3D model viewers required license keys and fees to use their technologies. The free stuff looked just meh. U3D was supposed to be a thing 10 years ago. My new 3D modeling apps dropped U3D from their exports. MAX and 3DS files for gaming are still king, as far as 3D content being made for the masses.

[LesleyLai]

There are no "machine level bytecode".

[Dennis-Earl-Smiley]

If youre going to do this, bring back java applets!

[bralis]

Will Webassembly make C++ more important that Java in near future?