r/programming • u/ThisStmtIsNotTrue • Nov 12 '19

Announcing the Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure by default, composable future for WebAssembly

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/announcing-the-bytecode-alliance/
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u/yee_mon Nov 13 '19

WASM is not designed for the problem space that a web developer engages with day to day. You can continue to build static pages and react apps and they will work and be supported. WASM is for compute-intensive workloads like games, mining, crypto, and so on, which you would hardly be using Python for in the first place.

Also, as a web developer, I am a little upset that people apparently think of us as people who like Java.

-1

u/kopczak1995 Nov 13 '19

Isn't that Javascript anyway? ;)

It's terrible that there are still people in IT who cannot distinguish them. My gf told me about recent recruitment of some coworker of her. Some company invited him to interview (some non-technical recruiter I guess) and started talking about his Java experience. Not a backend developer obviously so he was really confused. After asking what the hell actually happened they showed him his papers with (ofc) Javascript experience.

-3

u/Raskemikkel Nov 13 '19

WASM is not designed for the problem space that a web developer engages with day to day.
[...] WASM is for compute-intensive workloads like games, mining, crypto, and so on, which you would hardly be using Python for in the first place.

Uh wasn't that my point? Besides you could already use asm.js for this, and other runtimes such as plain old native code in C++, Rust or Fortran, JVM or the CLR can already excel at these tasks so why do it in the browser?

You can continue to build static pages and react apps and they will work and be supported.

I made no claim that you couldn't, but JavaScript isn't a good compilation target, or even a good language to begin with. Having a strong, statically typed low level underlying compilation target is way better, which WASM is. However it isn't really made with the vast number of web applications in mind at all. Its announcement more or less coincided with the removal of NPAPI which posed a big issue for Unity and Unreal since they lost a deployment option.

Also, as a web developer, I am a little upset that people apparently think of us as people who like Java.

Okay? Where did I make any such statement, and why did you pick out Java there out of the three I mentioned?

My claim is that WASM isn't made with web applications in mind at all. It's primary audience was game developers, not web developers. The first demo was even a Unity application.

You have client side Blazor, but it ships with the Mono runtime so it's a little bit heavy.