Hacker News Reader

Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Yes, absolutely. The only significant difference is that it isn't a plugin.

One other big difference is that it's not owned by a single private company. Adobe tried to monetize certain flash 3d features at some point, but was rebuked so they withdrew their plans.

Alright, I'll give them that. However, I think this will, like it has with the rest of the web, lead to differences in how each browser handles the spec, various browser-specific extensions, etc. In that way, it's actually worse than having one company behind it.

The JS community currently deals with this by way of "polyfills" I wonder will such an approach be easier or harder with WASM ...

Any differing behaviour from the spec is supposed to be behind feature flags so that WASM Applications can reliably detect and use these.

Wasm is the first major thing I can remember all the browsers agreeing on in a very long time, or ever.

Agreeing of course, after trying to do it on their own and then realizing they were thinking a lot of the same things.

>Wasm is the first major thing I can remember all the browsers agreeing on in a very long time, or ever.

Uh, flexbox, grid, fetch, service workers, even shadow DOM...? The cooperation between browser vendors has been exceptional over the last five years.

Are any of those as large and potentially as broad as wasm?

For frontend devs, sure.

And! is a public W3C standard, is open source, is just a VM, doesn't define own UI components, is not controlled by any private corporation, will be maintained by browsers' editors, and maybe too many other things I'm not aware of...

Remembering now the Monty Python's "What have the romans ever done for us" scene...

Not at all. WASM doesn't define a UI component.

Sure it does, canvas and WebGL are good enough for everything else.

Those aren't part of WASM.

Only because they don't have to be. Canvas and WebGL didn't exist back when Java and Flash were dominant, so they had to include equivalent functionality and step outside the DOM. It is meaningless to say that WASM is different because of this.

Why? WASM fundamentally changes nothing about what web sites can do or how they do it.

This article would make more sense if it were about Canvas, SVG, or any of the other JavaScript-accessible media elements which were added to enable Flash-like behavior from JavaScript. Those were game-changers.

Claiming WASM makes the web more Flash-like is like claiming ES 6 makes the web more Flash-like that ES 5. It doesn't. The existence of DOM scripting and scriptable media elements does, and WASM doesn't change this. Claiming it does is just sensationalism.

The 'WASM is the new flash' argument only succeeds if you conflate at least all of WASM, canvas, webgl, webaudio, websockets and several other APIs and call it all 'WASM.' That is misleading in my mind. All of this stuff was developed independently of WASM and is usable without WASM.

> It is meaningless to say that WASM is different because of this.

Flash can and did extend the browser in arbitrary ways. WASM is operating within a standards regime and relies on standards based capabilities. We need not worry, for instance, that WASM is going to independently implement an API for some peripheral (camera, microphone, etc.) that duplicates or supplants some existing, standards based browser capability. While that remains true there is a demonstrative difference.

> The 'WASM is the new flash' argument only succeeds if you conflate at least all of WASM, canvas, webgl, webaudio, websockets and several other APIs and call it all 'WASM.'

I think it is disingenuous not to include these features, because they didn't exist in any form when Java and Flash where big.

> Flash can and did extend the browser in arbitrary ways. WASM is operating within a standards regime and relies on standards based capabilities.

Yes, it did, because it had to. The features WASM is relying on for similar functionality did not exist at the time, there was literally no other way to do it.

So your argument is that WASM is different because now, nearly 20 years later, these features are part of the standard web.

> I think it is disingenuous not to include these features

Before you ever heard the term "WASM" all of "these features" were available via plain old HTML5 and Javascript. Since that is the case why not argue that browsers themselves are the new Flash? And if so, what does WASM have to do with it?

The answer to the last question is "nothing."

"These features" did not have their origin in WASM. They existed prior to WASM and function independently of WASM because they do not depend on WASM. They are not WASM. Full stop. Conflating them all into WASM is, in fact, disingenuous.

I suppose that's a fair perspective, but really what you're doing here is being pedantic. WASM is just the final step in integrating something like Flash or Java into the browser. That it took 20 years of standards adoption to get there isn't really relevant in my opinion.

Equating 20 years of open standards development to a proprietary extension will never add up in my book. If that's pedantry then so be it.

Even if it's twenty years of open standards that replicates the functionality of a proprietary extension? That it doesn't make sense to you doesn't make sense to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com