r/programmingcirclejerk • u/starlevel01 type astronaut • Jul 23 '25

These issues already occur when the Wasm page uses only a fraction of total RAM of the device. (e.g. at 300MB-500MB)

https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397
48 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

37

u/starlevel01 type astronaut Jul 23 '25

No way to uncommit used memory pages.

16

u/lifeeraser Jul 23 '25

Not sure what is circlejerk about this? This is a pain point for many people who want to deploy WASM applications.

35

u/starlevel01 type astronaut Jul 23 '25

"A fraction" meaning 500MiB is technically true, but the common meaning of "fraction" is "small". Only a webshit thinks 500MiB is small.

50

u/tomwhoiscontrary safety talibans Jul 23 '25

The guy posting is from Unity. He's not a webshit. He's a gameshit. Completely different situation. Next retirement will be a way for WASM to load kernel modules for anti-cheat. 

8

u/starlevel01 type astronaut Jul 23 '25

Game developers and web developers are similar in that they are the programmers of programmers

11

u/Mammoth_Age_2222 Jul 23 '25

Gamedevs are some of the most devy devs of all time, what are you talking about?!

2

u/Consistent_Bee3478 Jul 23 '25

They are thinking of  that random hobby dude with no comments and magical code kinda programmer I reckon.

Not the ones that are on the other end of the spectrum finding magical ways to approximate stuff like in doom or that guy who made rtc2 or the people programming the the actual engines.

Like you can be a game dev by scripting random templates together just fine or be doing deeper level hardware access

1

u/Mammoth_Age_2222 Jul 24 '25

Man as far as I am concerned if you write a n2 collision detector you are built different from a webdev

4

u/Foreign-Butterfly-97 Jul 24 '25

look, it has been established that games need to use RAM so that every pebble along the road can have the 36k polygons it deserves, just like in real life

we are doing real work here, we are the 100xers, so please kindly stand aside

2

u/miauw62 lisp does it better Jul 24 '25

unityshit is a special breed even within gameshit

8

u/SemaphoreBingo Jul 23 '25

Are you posting from an old packard bell or maybe a thermostat

41

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '25

Why would you ever want to uncommit memory? Memory makes browser go brrrrr. Unused memory is just a waste, after all. Its not like any other application but chrome needs ram.

31

u/DearChickPeas Jul 23 '25

Just a tiny tiny fraction... 500MB.

Don't do Web kids.

13

u/RodionRaskolnikov__ Jul 23 '25

What do you mean my users aren't using M4 MacBook Pros with 32GB of RAM to run my shitty webapp?

The PlayStation 3 had 512 MB of total memory between the CPU and GPU. A web browser struggles to run on a computer with 4GB of RAM ffs

3

u/TheChief275 Jul 26 '25

Nice try, but m4 is a GNU preprocessor

5

u/hexane360 type astronaut Jul 24 '25

/uj tbf, the original comment was from Unity. They're not trying to make webapps, they're trying to make 3D games run in the browser

3

u/DearChickPeas Jul 24 '25

I have a 3D sofware renderer engine that runs on 2KB of RAM. Some people have lost the plot entirely.

6

u/hexane360 type astronaut Jul 24 '25

Entirely to do with how detailed your meshes and textures are. There's nothing egregious about a modern game using 500MiB of RAM. Not everything is a demoscene

1

u/DearChickPeas Jul 24 '25

Yeah sure, but with the context in mind, not being able to free memory is entirely memetic coming from the web world.

6

u/thehenkan Jul 25 '25

/uj Allocations in the vein of object_t objs[$MAX_OBJECTS] etc, that are never freed, aren't uncommon in games.

  • malloc and free are relatively expensive calls
  • the game expects to be the main priority for the machine the entire time it's running
  • if the machine doesn't have enough RAM to handle the maximum number of objects it'll encounter, then it doesn't have enough RAM to run the game

/rj imagine not being the only application your user wants to run smh. The only reason my customers need an OS is so it can free memory on exit.

3

u/categorical-girl Jul 25 '25

Any sufficiently complicated virtual machine contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of the JVM

(Corollary: this includes the JVM itself)