Time for #DevDiscuss
Tonight’s topic is WebAssembly
Let’s chat!
- What is WebAssembly?
- How might WebAssembly affect your work in the future?
- What are the most interesting use cases?
- How might this upcoming technology affect decisions you make today?
WebAssembly brings powerful lower level languages like C/C++ to the browser by providing compilation targets for them. It is essentially an assembly language that can run alongside JavaScript. #DevDiscuss
WASM means you can theoretically bring the power and performance of these established languages to the browser. But it also means you can make other browser native languages even more performant. Think how your OS is fast and snappy, now imagine that perf in browser #DevDiscuss
Super interesting use case I can see, very powerful browser based gaming. Things like VR/AR based gaming could be very performant in the browser potentially. #DevDiscuss
I would be very careful holding back your tech decisions based on WASM though. I think you have to really evaluate what you would gain from using it before jumping on the bus to use it. As is the case with any technology though. #DevDiscuss
Live US political events tend to drown out #DevDiscuss, and combined with being off the last couple weeks, tonight's chat may not be as active.
So I'll hang out with y'all to chat a bit but won't try to force it too much. 😊
Web Assembly opens up a Web / Browser Stack layer that let's you ship text based code, which is directly complied to mchine code, rather than going through the JavaScript complier(Not the most efficient).
#DevDiscuss
I would certainly learn other technologies/languages first. WASM isn't something you should jump right into, I think you have to have a pretty good use case for it. #DevDiscuss
I'm worried that WASM will be abused by people who want to avoid the DOM and we'll see the return of fat binary blob UIs like the bad old days of Java applets.
That said I'm looking forward to seeing it used for code that isn't UI drawing and for 3d games. #DevDiscuss
What's different is the TIME, the hardware / developer readyness is a important factor in any new technological breakthrough.
Also WASM runs inside a Sandbox. Thus not having security problems that Flash had.
#DevDiscuss
I've used webassembly already!
I needed to parse TNEF (a legacy Outlook email format) files on a static webserver, but there weren't any JS libraries for TNEF.
I found a Go library, and wrote a quick WASM app which parsed and displayed the TNEF file in-browser!
#DevDiscuss
Time for #DevDiscuss
Tonight’s topic is WebAssembly
Let’s chat!
- What is WebAssembly?
- How might WebAssembly affect your work in the future?
- What are the most interesting use cases?
- How might this upcoming technology affect decisions you make today?
I’m really excited for anything to do with Big Data/Data Visualization. Obviously we still can’t do major computation in the browser, but I have a few experiments where I’m parsing/calculating huge JSON files/API responses. #DevDiscuss
Another Fun Fact is that JavaScript is a slow language* , the way V8 ( Chromium's JavaScript Engine) makes JavaScript fast is by converting / Transpiling it to NOT JS for faster execution.
Web assembly gives US the ability to ship fast NOT JS code
#DevDiscuss
*Relatively
Another important difference is that WASM is standard while those techs were private, that is IMo the main ret while they died and WASM is not going to die #DevDiscuss
In reply to
@ThisIsMePreet, @oldJavaGuy, @ThePracticalDev
PWA should be another topic we have on #DevDiscuss. There is a lot of cross over with WASM, but to me PWA is more approachable for quite a few more things right now.
Like Nodejs enabled JavaScript developers (who earlier were limited to front end) the ability to write server or backend code. WebAssembly will enable the backend developers to built front end and enable them to be fullstack. #DevDiscuss
