Linus' idea of "good taste" code

Dicebot via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Nov 1 00:14:32 PDT 2016


On Tuesday, 1 November 2016 at 06:04:41 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Monday, 31 October 2016 at 09:52:55 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> On 10/30/2016 06:35 PM, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
>>> But what I meant was LLVM will have a wasm backend.
>>
>> Yes, but it is developed so slowly and conservatively, that 
>> coming up with own proof-of-concept backend may be a chance to 
>> win early interest. They may speed up greatly though when 
>> WebAssembly design gets closer to MVP stage, but I am checking 
>> that regularly.
>
> I was disappointed that after early hype it all went quiet for 
> now.

Actually, they have moved one with browser previews and dedicated 
web site jsut as we were talking: http://webassembly.org

I am curious how much attention it will gather on i.e. reddit

>> But right now it is mostly irrelevant because runtime 
>> requirements have not been defined in WebAssembly at all, only 
>> low level byte code stuff. It is all in very early stages 
>> really.
>
> You have looked into it more than me at a low level, but how is 
> it possible then to run an app today in nightly browser in wasm?

How it works right now is that you can use WebAssembly byte-code 
to write a JavaScript-exposed function to be called from plain 
JavaScript. See http://webassembly.org/docs/js . Thus most of 
runtime level stuff is actually done by JS.

There are further plans to expose browser GC inside WebAssembly, 
allow direct usage of browser API like DOM and generally make 
possible to use it with no JavaScript at all - but those are all 
out of scope of MVP milestone.

> Taking a step back,  it's quite amusing how much ingenuity goes 
> into having to avoid writing Javascript...

Judging by focus points in public statements one can reason that 
actually main driving goal of WebAssembly developers is not to 
throw away JavaScript but to make existing JavaScript/asm.js code 
more efficient (by pre-compiling it on server and distributing in 
binary form).

At the same time such initiative is of great value to company 
like Google who has lost "better JS" competition (remember Dart 
language?) to Microsoft TypeScript. Having common ground in form 
of byte code supported by all browsers will in some way reset the 
competition again.


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