To summarize the talk for those in a hurry: the presenter, pretending to be from the future, describes YavaScript as an archaic computer language that served as a bootstrap to WASM, which is now the default compilation target for nearly all languages.
WASM is an extremely useful compilation target because of its portability (specially for running on browsers), but it is far from being the "default compilation target" for almost any language. The promised near-native speed is not here (in general you get x2 or x3 slower code but it can be even worse), it is limited to 32-bits (MEMORY64 is on the way but there is not a clear roadmap of when this will be generally available in browsers), blocking IO is a pain, and its design seems to be constrained by the underlying JS JIT (it still looks like ASM.JS with a different syntax).
I still believe that it is a miracle that we have WASM as a standard, and that it runs smoothly across different browser vendors, but why nobody seems to be worried about lack of progress in performance?
LLVM IR would be a much better binary target. It was used in the abandoned PNaCL project. AFAIK Apple uses it (bitcode) to store apps that are later compiled for specific platforms. WASM looks like a toy compared with this technology.
NortySpock|2 years ago
saghm|2 years ago
jfmc|2 years ago
I still believe that it is a miracle that we have WASM as a standard, and that it runs smoothly across different browser vendors, but why nobody seems to be worried about lack of progress in performance?
LLVM IR would be a much better binary target. It was used in the abandoned PNaCL project. AFAIK Apple uses it (bitcode) to store apps that are later compiled for specific platforms. WASM looks like a toy compared with this technology.
unknown|2 years ago
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