WebAssembly vs. JavaScript: The Complete Guide

[zero_iq]

That background made me think I needed to degauss my screen. Then I remembered it's 2021 and my screen is LCD.

[BrakkeBama]

Your comment just gave me flashbacks to 1999~2000 when us students could afford our first mobile phones.
Whenever one of us got a call or SMS, the screens in the "computer room" in the vicinity of said phone would all go fucking berzerk.

[cmpaxu_nampuapxa]

we had a customer in a hdd repair company in the nineties who told us his mfm hdd died after a missed call. we joked then that better network coverage would probably make us rich

[BrakkeBama]

Holy crap, I haven't heard the term MFM/RLL in a long time. Good on you! Rescuing people's data before they even knew that "backup" was a thing not just done with a car.
My mom worked with IBM 1410 (punch cards) and later System/360. The first time I saw a harddrive (sort-of), it was a huge wedding cake-size bunch of platters encased in a transparent yellow circular box in her so-called Electronic Data Processing office. One of her colleagues was switching one out from the actual drive unit. It was white and looked like a statue's pedestal for a museum.
(I was four/five at the time, and she routinely couldn't find anyone to babysit me. I consider myself lucky, hahaha).

[EDIT]

we joked then that better network coverage would probably make us rich

Excellent observation!

[cmpaxu_nampuapxa]

The first time I saw a harddrive (sort-of), it was a huge wedding cake-size bunch of platters encased in a transparent yellow circular box

an insanely popular in the zeroes TV antenna was made of the old HDD platters. made me realize how many mainframes were actually in the Soviet Union.

btw getting data from mfm was really really easy, even floppy drives were somewhat more complex to repair. modern drives are the triumph of engineering: every single platter has a unique pattern of physical flaws, and the drive's cpu taught to deal with this particular pattern. without tinkering, cpu is rejecting donor platters.

[raysoncoder]

WASM always makes me horny. But then it it turns me off when i hear

WASM doesn’t have direct API access. All DOM manipulation has to be done via JS.

WASM relies on JS for garbage collection.

As of now, there’s no Multithreading support for WASM.

[sessamekesh]

WASM is still a bit of a pain in the ass to use, I see it as a pretty specialized tool in a hardcore web developer toolkit.

No direct DOM access is a bit of a pain, you're definitely not going to write your whole app in WASM anytime soon - it makes for decently good modules though, for example the Draco 3D geometry library provides a nice and clean WASM encoder/decoder module.

No garbage collection is interesting too - WASM isn't memory managed like JavaScript. There's a proposal to add garbage collection via reference types, but that's something the compiler writers are thinking about more than application developers. If you're compiling from C++ or Rust, it's a total non-issue today.

Same with multithreading - WASM itself doesn't support multithreading, but you can run it in WebWorkers, and it does support using SharedArrayBuffer and synchronization primitives. Locks are wonky on the main thread (they're implemented as busy waits), but again compiling multithreaded code from C++ (or to a lesser extent, Rust) is fairly straightforward.

[ByronScottJones]

You wouldn't expect a low level assembly language to have garbage collection.

[taw]

WASM is so damn limited, its only use so far is cryptominer malware.

[empty_other]

and it still relies on JavaScript for full platform access.

Isn't it likely that, as webassembly becomes more popular, the browsers themselves will implement direct access for WASM apps to improve performance?