[guntis_dev]

I've worked with WebAssembly on several real world use cases

Codec support: Built video and audio decoding in Wasm to bring codec support to browsers that didn't have it natively. Also helped with a custom video player to work around HLS latency issues on Safari.

Code sharing: We had business logic written in C that needed to run both frontend and backend. Compiled it to Wasm for the frontend, which guaranteed identical behaviour across environments.

Obfuscation: Currently exploring Wasm for "hiding" some JavaScript logic by rewriting critical parts in Rust and compiling to Wasm. We tried JS obfuscators (including paid ones), but they killed performance. Wasm gives us both obfuscation and better performance.

[austin-cheney]

To hide parts of JavaScript my best recommendation is to just not send the undesirable JavaScript to the browser in the first place. There are performance and security improvements to that which would be lost when trying to remove this same code after it does arrive to the browser.

That modification could be as simple as opening the concerned code file in your back end application as a large string and slicing out the parts you don't want. This will likely require some refactoring of the JavaScript code first to ensure the parts you wish to remove are islands whose absence won't break other things.

[guntis_dev]

Without revealing too much, the business logic must remain client side for this use case, and it's a common problem across our industry.

I've explained the security reality to the business many times - any JavaScript sent to the client can be read, executed, proxied, or tampered with. That's just how browsers work.

The current directive is - make it as difficult to understand as reasonably possible. We're not trying to stop determined adversaries (that's impossible), but we can raise the bar high enough to deter script kiddies and casual attackers from easily abusing it.

[socalgal2]

are any of those codecs open source? A idea for a side project is browser based VLC (play any format). More ideally, a library that lets you play any old format in the browser.

[guntis_dev]

For open implementations, look at ffmpeg.wasm - it's FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly and supports a wide range of codecs. It's open source and actively maintained.

Some truly open/royalty-free codecs you could use - video: VP8, VP9, AV1. audio: Opus, Vorbis, FLAC.

That said, building a VLC in the browser gets complicated quickly because of licensing - even if the decoder implementation is open source, some codecs have patent licensing requirements depending on jurisdiction and use case. For example, H.264's basic patents have mostly expired, but I'd verify the specific profiles you need.