Linus' idea of "good taste" code

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

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.

I guess there is a window to grab attention,  but language like 
nim already has a JS backend (so they say - I haven't used), and 
I think D is in a different space from languages where how it 
plays on hacker news is most important.   Because if you have a 
wasm backend today for dmd,  I guess it will be some time before 
it's fast,  stable,  and has the basic stuff already in 
emscripten (though maybe with Remedy work it gets easier to wrap 
that).  So given limited manpower maybe the easier job 
(presumably most work needs to be done on phobos and runtime?) 
makes sense because in this case it's also likely the long term 
sensible way.   It would be great if we had a dmd back end early 
of course,  and I would certainly use it as soon as it was stable 
enough.

> 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?  
  Is it like saying you don't need glibc,  but it's probably a 
better idea to use one written for your platform rather than have 
some combination of assembly and hacked up library designed for 
another architecture and platform (which is what I guess 
emscripten do)?

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