Honestly I’m better off this way, personally. At least javascript is text, and very often readable after pretty printing and debuggabke as a user, I’m not comfortable with loading basically opaque binaries for websites.
Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?
Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.
I agree with your main point though, it’s kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people’s code to run on our machines.
I still have no idea what WASM really is. I’ve tried looking at articles but it still confuses me. I know how to use HTML, CSS, JS, and actual ARM assembly language at a basic level, but I don’t see how any of this could be used with WASM.
WASM is just like assembly. It has instructions similar to MOV, JMP, STA, etc. It can be distributed as the textual instructions or as the compiled binary format.
When it started it was interpreted by JS or could be compiled to JS directly. It proved to be faster than hand-written JS. However, it still had to go through a JS interpreter. Now, there’s a WASM interpreter / virtual machine built into browsers. It’s very much the new java bytecode but without running an unsandboxed, external (outside of the browser) java virtual machine.
Given it’s an intepreter / virtual machine, it of course has limited APIs in the browser. For a while, it was not possible to access the DOM from WASM, so JS would do the DOM stuff and WASM was called (just like calling an external function in a lib in C/C++/Rust/…) upon to do computationally complex stuff since it was faster than running it in JS through the JS interpreter. IINM, WASM now does have access to the DOM.
Of course there are WASM interpreters outside of browsers that can be included as libraries in other languages. Rust devs are using it for example for plugin systems in their software.
WASM still hasn’t convinced enough people to drop JS and write their website in something other than JS/TS. Maybe someday…
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Honestly I’m better off this way, personally. At least javascript is text, and very often readable after pretty printing and debuggabke as a user, I’m not comfortable with loading basically opaque binaries for websites.
Isn’t production JavaScript usually minified/obfuscated to make it hard to read?
Also wasm is actually bytecode, which I believe has a 1:1 conversion into a text-based format called wat.
I agree with your main point though, it’s kinda creepy when you realise just how much we are expected to allow other people’s code to run on our machines.
Somewhat, but often it’s still readable. Or maybe I just don’t look at it often enough to notice the worse cases…
That’s good to be aware of, thanks!
I still have no idea what WASM really is. I’ve tried looking at articles but it still confuses me. I know how to use HTML, CSS, JS, and actual ARM assembly language at a basic level, but I don’t see how any of this could be used with WASM.
WASM is just like assembly. It has instructions similar to
MOV,JMP,STA, etc. It can be distributed as the textual instructions or as the compiled binary format.When it started it was interpreted by JS or could be compiled to JS directly. It proved to be faster than hand-written JS. However, it still had to go through a JS interpreter. Now, there’s a WASM interpreter / virtual machine built into browsers. It’s very much the new java bytecode but without running an unsandboxed, external (outside of the browser) java virtual machine.
Given it’s an intepreter / virtual machine, it of course has limited APIs in the browser. For a while, it was not possible to access the DOM from WASM, so JS would do the DOM stuff and WASM was called (just like calling an external function in a lib in C/C++/Rust/…) upon to do computationally complex stuff since it was faster than running it in JS through the JS interpreter. IINM, WASM now does have access to the DOM.
Of course there are WASM interpreters outside of browsers that can be included as libraries in other languages. Rust devs are using it for example for plugin systems in their software.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0