'WebAssembly Is Finally Usable, Almost'

https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinwarren/2024/04/04/webassembly-is-finally-usable-almost/

by MilnerRoute • 2 years ago

20 44 2 years ago

flohofwoe8• 2 years ago

WebAssembly has been working just fine since 2017.

This article is just hype for WASI 0.2 and the Component Model, which at closer look seems to suffer from second-system effect at best, or Rust people ruining a perfectly fine standard (WASI 0.1) at worst.

dxhdr• 2 years ago

What problems is WASI 0.2 and the Component Model solving? I've read the project goals but I still don't quite understand.

I mean, I guess having some defined interface between languages might be useful for some specific usecases, I just don't see what that has to do with WASM and I also don't understand how this complexity would be a net benefit to the broader ecosystem.

pjmlp9• 2 years ago

Basically since they want to redo P-Code/M-Code/JVM/CLR/BEAM/TIMI/Language Environments/..., now they need to re-invent CORBA, DCOM, XPC, AIDL, gRPC as well.

They already reinvented application servers with WASM containers on Kubernetes.

Otherwise how one would expect to create startups whose goal is to deliver services on top of WebAssembly, something whose original goal was only being a safer ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, Applets, PNaCL, asm.js, alongside JavaScript.

flohofwoe8• 2 years ago

Exactly. AFAIK the idea is the same as 1990's COM or CORBA, but for WASM (e.g. being able to call between WASM "DLLs" written in different languages but without having to define a C API for each DLL), so pretty much irrelevant for statically linked WASM apps or anything that uses C APIs anyway to talk to each other.

leucippe2• 2 years ago

For background, WASI 0.1 is one interface: a smaller POSIX. Translating POSIX's low-level ABI concepts into WASM is enough for this. WASI came out of WASM's goal of portability, and 0.1 makes WASM portable across POSIX systems.

WASM and WASI aim to support other embeddings. WASI 0.2 introduces an interface for HTTP servers and clients, aimed at cloud/edge. Currently Docker images (on an OS) get used here, but POSIX, even small POSIX, is bloat. WASI 0.2 plans a range of other interfaces for embedding WASM e.g. IOT, so that even without POSIX, you still have portable standards, in your preferred language.

HTTP is a high-level idea. HTTP libraries in any language are never about writing binary to TCP sockets, they're about requests and responses. Depending on sockets would miss the point of leaving POSIX behind. A smaller, loosely-coupled API surface gives both sides more freedom. The runtime can work with the system, the language can work with its users, and the tooling can generate minimal glue that links them together.

Why define WASI APIs with an abstract interface rather than a rigid binary one? Because it follows the spirit of WASM's existing goals: low-level when needed for performance, and high-level whenever it makes WASM simpler to target, embed or reason about. That's why WASM has low-level assembly instructions yet high-level structured control-flow. It's also why WASI uses types appropriate for the API in question (e.g. files in the POSIX interface, responses in HTTP) yet translates them to binary glue when linking real hosts and guests.

Lin Clark's 2019 article[1] raises an issue that comes with low-level interfaces: But if a function takes or returns anything besides numbers, things get complicated. You can either: - Ship one module that has a really hard-to-use API that only speaks in numbers… making life hard for the module’s user. - Add glue code for every single environment you want this module to run in… making life hard for the module’s developer. Clark argues WebAssembly is the right abstraction level to solve this issue in an efficient yet ergonomic way. Frankly, if your WASM module written in Go wants to talk to your host in Java, I don't see why that needs to involve C bindings.

The Component Model falls out of WASI as a bonus. WASI needs to interoperate modules with their embeddings. From there WASI may as well (Lin Clark puts it) "interoperate all the things".

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-type...

pjmlp9• 2 years ago

We don't need Component Model, rather good tooling that makes as easy to spew WebAssembly as using AssemblyScript, not having to install alternative compiler toolchains.

Additionally the whole WebAssembly on the server is JVM/CLR/BEAM envy, fuelled with SV money for the next big thing, better served with plain old containers.

jauntywundrkind2• 2 years ago

WASI preview1 modules aren't very modular. You can't compose them. All you can do is one shot compile & bundle the world into one massive module. You can't use that module to power another module, it basically has to be standalone.

Luke Wagner has a talk going through WASI 0.2 that's pretty excellent. The title is What is a component (and why)?, and we go step by step through the properties component-model enables: a Standard Portable Lightweight Finely-Sandboxed Cross-Language Compositional Module. You get basically none of these without component-model. https://youtu.be/tAACYA1Mwv4

The properties are amazing. Not only do we get Cross-Language, not only do we get composable, but ideally we get very very lightweight sandboxed processes that can safely re-use modules already loaded by the runtime. This could be such an incredible way to sandbox actively, with a base of supportinginrsriss dwarfing anything computer science has done before.

The wasm view here has been so shortsighted & brutal. Once again, the hype cycle has gotten big enough that a lot of people are very angry & actively trying to tear down & discredit. Like systemd, like K8s. With not even a passing attempt to show balanced views in the process, no nods to the possible or good, just remorseless total war. This is the famous typical dripping sense of disdain, arising again in angry stirrings, here now to rage against component-model. Holy shit yes is it ambitious and hard. Yes you should be afraid of failure, of this crew not pulling it off & not making it work. But my heavens what a bunch of far-too-typical backhanded mean-girl horseshit is being heaped up to spiritually crush & deaden the effort, convincing everyone we should never try hard or attemot big efforts.

I see a future where we can spawn safe secure processes instead of promises, where we can run processes at such scale. Where we can mix languages. There's something so intensely interesting & compelling, upscaling & paving the road for something like V8 isolated that have had such success enabling scalable online platforms, and taking it from exotic dark material for the hyperscalers & turning it to something standard & accessible, fast & secure, spanning the whole technical ecosystem. It's worth the risk ya'll. Maybe we'll hit every branch of the CORBA tree on the way down & fail, but I for one tend to think we're such an improved world since those days: the web technical architecture groups along with open source footing have been an incredible combination for hashing through hard problems & building good protocols & standards piece by piece that let us keep composing better solutions, that let us build upwards successfully. And I'm so excited for this future, for what could be here.

Please educate yourself & come correct if this is an interesting topic that you want to engage in; there's so many resources out there. Never have we had a time where it's easier to dig in, from wonderful talks to in depth meeting notes. Please be more serious than oMGggg cORbA gRoSS it'll never work. Most of all, I dare you imagine it does work. And as a smart open minded technical sort, you should leave some space for that as a possibility in your cynicism, should have the possibility of success in your risk profile.

pjmlp9• 2 years ago

"This first part of this article discusses creating language-independent components, that is, components that can be consumed by apps that are written in any language. You can also create a single component or app from source code written in multiple languages; see Cross-Language Interoperability in the second part of this article."

From "Language independence and language-independent components" in MSIL, originally published in 2001.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/language-i...

flohofwoe8• 2 years ago

I'm a WASM fanboy and cheerleader as anyone, all the way back before asm.js was even an idea and Emscripten was one of the weirder ways to make C code run in browsers (https://floooh.github.io/2012/10/23/mea-culpa.html).

So far, that whole endeavour made perfect sense to me, one small evolutionary improvement on top of another (even the switch from asm.js to wasm was evolutionary from the pov of the user, you just provided a different compiler switch, and you got wasm output instead of asm.js which ran at the same or slightly better speed).

WASI 0.1 was another evolutionary step that made total sense. It had a clear and simple mission: "provide a POSIX compatibility layer for WASM blobs". Very easy to communicate, very easy to use. You just write against (a subset of) the POSIX API and you get a WASM blob that runs on every WASM runtime that provides WASI compatibility, and providing full WASI compatibility wasn't all that hard, more or less just map to existing POSIX calls of the underlying platform.

But with WASI 0.2 I have for the very first time in 12 years the impression that the involved people are straying away from the successful evolutionary approach into architecture astronaut territory (and I have never seen that end well).

WASI 0.2 (0.3, etc...) should just be small improvements over WASI 0.1: better POSIX compatibility.

But with 'actual' WASI 0.2 I don't even know what it's supposed to be despite trying to keep up, it certainly can't be described in a single sentence except "it's awesome, just educate yourself!" - well I tried and I'm just as clueless as before. The problems it apparently wants to solve are nothing I care about (which isn't the case for WASI 0.1 which solves a very important problem for me).

What would be important to me in the near future is being able to run WASI 0.1 blobs on any popular desktop operating system without having to install a 3rd party runtime, a hard nut to crack of course because it requires getting Microsoft, Apple and probably even Linus on board - and the more complex WASI becomes, the less likely such a thing is.

Meanwhile, there's a real need to improve the POSIX compatibility of WASI 0.1 (for instance currently there's no concept of a current working directory for instance, but a lot of POSIX code depends on this).

Instead I get the impression that the WASI project has been hijacked and is being turned into something entirely different, with the original mission to provide a POSIX compatibility layer just being a little appendix that will soon be forgotten (apparently that appendix is now called 'wasi-libc').

I can only offer this advice: it would be better to take all the things that are not related to POSIX compatibility out of WASI and into a new project under a new name (maybe WASCOM or smth dunno...) and clearly mark that as "experimental". That would entirely avoid all the backlash and confusion you might currently be seeing, and probably also unblock 'actual' WASI progress (in the sense of improving POSIX compatibility).

mcint2• 2 years ago

A forbes article on this? Perhaps it's the contributor '/sites/' that I'm not familiar with.

pzmarzly• 2 years ago

AFAIK /sites subpath is mostly for articles made by "Forbes Contributors". How does one become one? You need to be invited by one of employees[0], but then it seems you can publish whatever with little editorial oversight[1]. You get paid, starting at $250 a month[2].

Personally, I find the idea nice, but a lot of these contributor articles seem to be poorly written anyways, so I try not to bother with them. But I guess that compared to a lot of other places in modern internet, especially medium.com and a ton of blogspammy wordpress sites, these must still look like Shakespeare in comparison.

[0] https://joshsteimle.com/writing/who-do-i-contact-at-forbes-t...

[1] https://getonforbes.com/forbes-contributor-guest-posting/

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2018/02/14/why-forb...

mcint2• 2 years ago

Once I noticed the surprisingly consistent, legibly distanced branding, I imagined something -- actually more like contributors paying. Thank you for the research & explanation!

drozycki2• 2 years ago

Figma has been using wasm in production since 2017.

Wasm in the browser has its niches, but JS remains the best choice when considering load time and transfer size. JS is not the pinnacle of dev experience, but any other language has megabytes of runtime or libraries which need to be fetched and loaded before your application code. All browsers have JS batteries included, for better and for worse.

flohofwoe8• 2 years ago

but any other language has megabytes of runtime or libraries which need to be fetched and loaded before your application code.

It's really not that bad for languages that allow an embedded-programming style (C, Rust, C++, Zig, ...). For instance this C64 emulator written in C has a 97.5 KBytes compressed WASM blob (and this includes 20 KBytes of dense ROM data which is barely reduced in size when compressed), plus 14 KBytes for the JS shim:

https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/c64.html

By comparison, the minified and compressed main.js file of JS Beeb (which I assume contains the bulk of the emulation code) is 119 KBytes download size:

https://bbc.xania.org/

josephg• 2 years ago

JS remains the best choice when considering load time and transfer size.

Wasm often has a larger transfer size (although wasmgc might go a long way toward alleviating this). But it also often has a smaller load time. Web browsers can load equivalently sized wasm bundles much faster than they can load JavaScript.

drozycki2• 2 years ago

Where can I learn more about this?

pjmlp9• 2 years ago

Additionally if computation performance is a bottleneck, just write some shader code, much easier than dealing with WebAssembly toolchains.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

When I looked into Web Assembly I was surprised to find it doesn't drive the DOM.

flohofwoe8• 2 years ago

I really wonder why the DOM always comes up. The DOM is just one browser API among many, and WASM is a virtual instruction set. Browser APIs have been designed for Javascript (for better or worse) meaning they work with Javascript objects and properties. WASM isn't Javascript, and it only works with floats and integers, so it needs an FFI layer to talk to browser APIs.

In the end, calling from WASM into JS isn't all that different than calling from native machine code into a virtual machine like .NET or the JVM.

pjmlp9• 2 years ago

For me the best way to think about WebAssembly, is to use the same approach as to keep a sane NDK experience on Android, write the code in a way that is always called from the host, instead of a interweb from down and upcalls.

kreetx2• 2 years ago

But WASM is a virtual instruction set for the browser, so wouldn't it be convenient (and maybe fast) to control DOM from it?

I guess one can run WASM on servers, too, but aren't there plenty of ways there to do it already?

skrapion• 2 years ago

WASM without DOM would be like if your operating system said "you can write your code in any language, but if you want to output anything to the screen, you need to compile your code as a DLL and call it from a C program."

For an assembly language designed to run in the browser, I wouldn't characterize DOM access as "just one of many APIs". DOM access is the most universal need in front end programs.

yencabulator2• 2 years ago

Unfortunately the DOM APIs were specified to have Javascript-specific details in them. As far as I understand it, the best way to access the DOM from WASM would be to define a new WASI Component -compatible API for the DOM.

Nobody's done the work yet, and I think the current strategy is to tackle easier APIs first, as WASI might not be good enough to describe the DOM at this time.

With a DOM API independent of Javascript, you could have a C/C++/Rust DOM in the host, and C/C++/Rust code inside WASM calling functions on the DOM, without needing to talk about Javascript types in the middle.

pjmlp9• 2 years ago

Says interview with a startup that promotes WebAssembly.

nilslice4• 2 years ago

and not even standard Wasm, but a problematic, unfinished abstraction layer…

aitchnyu• 2 years ago

Cross platform apps with declarative UI; universal document format; filesystem permissions; cross platform, secure, C-speed VM; web has scooped OSes yet again.

singularity2001• 2 years ago

HN has obligatory tags for articles from previous years, maybe after (almost) two months this warrants an "old / repeat / April" tag too?

I'm certain this was discussed before.

'WebAssembly Is Finally Usable, Almost'

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