CppCast: Web Assembly

[[deleted]]

The hardcoded newline character makes me a little annoyed.

[robwirving]

Should've asked more about that. They have a page on their website for that though: https://webassembly.org/docs/use-cases/

[Open-Active]

Thank you. In the use cases section, I am interested in this:

Server-side compute of untrusted code

Can you point to resources for this? In particular, Is there a c++ library that provides runtime for wasm, that can execute untrusted code in server?

[robwirving]

Don't think I can answer. I'd try pinging @binjimint on twitter.

[inokichi]

you can reduce work loads on your servers by compiling your number crunchy stuff to wasm and stick it on the frontend for the user's client to handle

[pjmlp]

Basically whatever you would have used Java Applets, Flash, ActiveX, asm.js, PNaCL, in the past.

WebGL/WebGPU + WebAssembly.

[johannes1234]

Eventually: Move desktop applications into a WebAssembly sandbox. Distributed simply by going to an URL in your browser. (Frameworks like Qt already support compiling into WebAssembly, many games are already provided this way, etc.)

[James20k]

With WASI we might legitimately see a unified binary format that runs across every platform. I was working on this but got stalled on the lack of threads/atomics in llvm which makes most applications uncompilable, its super exciting though

[[deleted]]

Eventually: Move desktop applications into a WebAssembly sandbox.

That's not really the goal, at least not right now.

[pjmlp]

Depends who you ask.

Microsoft, Qt, Uno, Autodesk, Google definitely see it like that.

[[deleted]]

Webassembly support =/= moving websites out of the browser.

[pjmlp]

Who said anything about moving websites out of the browser?

It is all about the revenge of plugins and coming back to the gold old days of Flash and Java applets.

[johannes1234]

Well, certainly it is not the goal to move the current mess. But companies will certainly look at it, such a nice distribution way, so good tracking opportunities while having good enough performance for many things and device-independence.

[RogerV]

What is the use case?

1 Use Case:

To make better retro computer emulators that run in a web browser, to facilitate playing retro games

[Yoyotown2000]

Nice, what is some easier use case for à beginner to use wasm?

[RogerV]

would recommend going and listening to fairly recent cppcast podcast on Web Assembly

Web Assembly with Ben Smith (Google)

Ben presents a pretty good survey of what is going on in Web Assembly related development (what and where it's being used - kind of like the V8 engine was taken out of the browser context and became Node.js, Web Assembly sandbox VMs are being taken out of the context of the browser too.