D could catch this wave: web assembly

Joakim via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Thu Jun 18 03:36:14 PDT 2015


On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 08:05:48 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
> This appears to have involvement from all major browser 
> vendors, which provides hope it might actually catch on 
> properly. An llvm backend will be created which will compile to 
> "wasm", hopefully LDC and/or SDC could glue to this.
>
> https://www.w3.org/community/webassembly/
>
> https://github.com/WebAssembly
>
> In particular, see 
> https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/HighLevelGoals.md https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md and https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/MVP.md

Sigh, another attempt to sneak native code into the browser, 
rather than just admitting that the web stack blows.  I have to 
admit I was hopeful about NaCl, but it appears to have gone 
nowhere.

Why can't they just admit that the core architecture of the web 
is horrific, ie an antiquated document format based on some 
shitty 50-year old IBM markup language 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language), a programming runtime that was cranked out in 10 days in the middle of the browser wars and certainly shows it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Netscape_and_JavaScript), and a stylesheet language hacked on top to eliminate some redundancy, _by adding yet another language_?!

As Tim Bray, of all people, wrote a couple years ago, this 
Titanic is losing to native mobile apps and it's only a matter of 
time till it's sunk:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2014/01/01/Software-in-2014

But what do they do instead of starting anew?  Keep rearranging 
the deck chairs on the Titanic.  "Maybe if we fly in and install 
a new engine, it won't sink?!"

endRant();


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