WebAssembly: A new development paradigm for the web | Hacker News Reader

WebAssembly: A new development paradigm for the web

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1 pointjocaal2 comments

I really lack time to watch & respond to YouTube videos & really wish I had some ML system I used/knew to help me quickly assess such submissions.

The one off the bat comment though is that it's not a development paradigm. It's opening the floodgates to the web being a trillion million new & different things. If folks thought webdev was hard & complex before, there's about to be 3000x more choice & freedom. And you won't have view source this time.

I am a JS fanboy, but I relished the era where JS was the crossroads of all the other developers, where backends weren't JS & JS was an incidental meeting grounds for many minds & many ways of doing things. Now that we have a de jure JS Uber Alles, JS over all, I'm excited & happy to re-mix the world. But there are some very frightening ramifications for legibility, which are very quickly going from fine to meh to bottom-of-the-ocean, and how we can make this happen while being RFC-8890 The Internet is for End Users[1] complaint is a daunting & perhaps unlikely prospect. But I am glad, even though we hurt users here, to unshackle new forms of development, which I hope & pray help user's agency.

Alas the early indicators are all devilish shits making things worse. Flutter CanvasKit obliterates userscripts entirely. Hixie's Towards A Modern Web Stack[2] doesn't pause for a millisecond to consider the impact of what it preaches, is 100% focused on possible developer experiences. This is what most wasm work will be, and it's basically targeted demolition of the only hypermedia form factor humanity has, of our best tower of babel that all parties speak, to instead give developers divine right to control everything. Societal sabotage.

Exciting times, but Here Be Dragons, bad forces for humankind.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8890

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696

I hope the time spent was worth learning something new :). I think having new languages have access to the dom can have huge benefits to end users but as you said, the initial indicators aren't looking good. It seems that there isn't a general consensus on how the web should be handled as a target platform. There is a talk from Alan Kay[1] where he says the web should've been like an operating system kernel from the start (if you want the juicy part it is at 23:45). The fact that both the inital users of this tech, after unlocking these new abilities, opted to use it to increase performance for canvas, instead of trying to create real web experiences leads me to think that those developers share his viewpoint.

[1] https://youtu.be/FvmTSpJU-Xc

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