Great!

I don't know about others but I'm not expecting it to be an amazing experience. It's more that I expect not having DOM interop to be an amazingly boring experience. Maybe Rust could be good for Web Workers but it'll be far more interesting when I can use it for interactions.

The overhead problem you mention reminds me a little of the false intuition that people have about databases.

I've worked on a couple projects where people were surprised that as the data set grew (either more customers, or accumulated customer activity), operations like INSERT and UPDATE got slower and slower, even without new functionality getting in the way. Everyone expects SELECT to get slower, but INSERTs seem to catch them off guard.

Every INSERT or UPDATE has to update the indexes. And when you quadruple the data, the update time for each index doubles. At first the cost of the insert is in the noise floor. It's swamped by the communication and transaction overhead. But after a handful of doublings it becomes detectable. A few more and it becomes noticeable. After a few more it becomes a problem, and if you haven't already changed your product roadmap, you do now.

To make a web page fast, you have to correlate the DOM with the CSS and the viewport. Adding more data isn't free.

Thanks for the link!

there's a human readable version, you can read more about it here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst...

The ability to preserve “view source” has been a first-class consideration of wasm since the beginning. It’s effectivly the same as JavaScript in this regard.

> Is a disassembler for WASM a thing yet?

Yes, it's part of the standard toolkit. See https://github.com/WebAssembly/wabt and specifically the "wasm2wat" tool.

I've tried to read source code from YouTube and let me tell you:

If that kills it, it was already dead. Obfuscation and minification is already as bad as bytecode. Honestly, wasm might be a little better because there are less insane hacks and more simple, if low level, code.

Also, if people are willing to implement DRM in it just because it's bytecode, I'd rather they did that than implemented rootkits in all of the browsers. Thanks for that one W3C.

Webpacked and possibly optimized/minified JavaScript is basically the same thing as compiled code. We are already there.

I cannot disagree more. Sure, the days of "View Source" might be coming to an end (although I doubt it), but there has never, and I mean never been an easier time to get started with these things. The vast amount of tools and resources for learning available for free is unprecedented. The open web is quite safe for years, if not decades to come.

> when we can make web pages, and entire sites without once actually using something a human can disassemble and reverse engineer ... this will be the end of the open web. truly the complete dead end of it.

No more than it was when Flash was a thing, or Java applets, or Silverlight. The world has been presented with numerous opportunities to turn the web into nothing but binaries, it hasn't happened.

>Unless maybe I'm missing something.

You're missing the part where someone would have to put a gun to everyone's head and force them to rewrite the entire web as WASM blobs, then force all of the browsers to be redesigned, and the servers, so that HTML and plaintext are deprecated, for your doomsday scenario to be even remotely plausible.