Post by @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 7 hr. ago

oh my fucking god https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Guides/Concepts#porting_from_cc wasm is so fuckex

By itself, WebAssembly cannot currently directly access the DOM; it can only call JavaScript, passing in integer and floating point primitive data types. Thus, to access any Web API, WebAssembly needs to call out to JavaScript, which then makes the Web API call. Emscripten therefore creates the HTML and JavaScript glue code needed to achieve this.

literally what the fuck is the point of this. any of this

WebAssembly concepts - WebAssembly | MDNMDNMDNMozilla

This article explains the concepts behind how WebAssembly works including its goals, the problems it solves, and how it runs inside the web browser's JavaScript engine.

1 Boost

0 Likes

shrub

@shrub900@mastodon.social 23 min. ago

@hipsterelectron wasm is only useful OUTSIDE of the web because you need so much js to do web stuff with it, however it does provide us the possibility to cross compile anything that can be compiled to wasm to c89 and then run it on plan 9 so thats fun

[object Object]

@zzt@mas.to 1 hr. ago

@hipsterelectron “WebAssembly cannot currently” every time I consider wasm for anything I see this phrase or a phrase like it

maybe I’m salty that half of the rust ecosystem is now piles and piles of code to compile for wasm or wasi or some shit that doesn’t work like anything else and makes porting to a new platform a fucking nightmare

emilia microsystems

@emiliamicrosystems@brain.worm.pink 3 hr. ago

@hipsterelectron wasm would be so good if it was good

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@emiliamicrosystems my contrarian take is that (a) the OS should be providing virtualization and (b) languages are literally incapable of performing virtualization and (c) instead generally serve to constitute a form of DRM enforcement

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@emiliamicrosystems the language facilities for things like visibility are supposed to be an aid to programmers and cloud vendors seek instead to provide EEE language runtimes to avoid actually fixing the lack of isolation guarantees in linux and every other modern OS including all BSDs and seL4 (which is better but not even close to enough)

emilia microsystems

@emiliamicrosystems@brain.worm.pink 3 hr. ago

@hipsterelectron hmm
i think if done right wasm could have similar goals to uxn and similar projects , to be a minimal portable vm things can run on
but alas it is just webslop

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@emiliamicrosystems yeah vms are cool but the entire community continually decides to accept google's decree banning unconstrained jump and therefore arbitrary control flow which makes it a dead end in my view

2+ more replies

d.rift

@d_rift@beige.party 3 hr. ago

@hipsterelectron JavaScript doesn't have an integer type last I checked; what are they smoking

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@d_rift fun fact! the lack of an integer type is intentional and part of the larger bullshit about dates and times

d.rift

@d_rift@beige.party 3 hr. ago

@hipsterelectron let's feed data that passed through this format into pandas to inject it into a tensorflow pipeline; Surely Nothing Will Go Wrong! It's before coffee, I may be extra salty.

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@d_rift json having no specification for parsing an indefinite stream of top-level objects is about as bad as not having an integer or god forbid an actual fucking byte vector (which as a primitive data type is actually superior to an "integer" in every possible way for the purposes of serialization)

1 more reply

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@d_rift that's of course an accusation made without evidence because nobody would ever be caught saying "we are not introducing an integer type in order to do evil shit". you can probably do it with array buffers just fine but it'll be slower than native

d.rift

@d_rift@beige.party 3 hr. ago

@hipsterelectron if I can't do evil shit with array buffers, I've forgotten much, lol

1 more reply

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@d_rift if i were not so intimately familiar with python i would never have assumed a language would choose to be horribly broken literally on purpose and for evil reasons not sheer obstinacy

Matthew Martin

@mistersql@mastodon.social 7 hr. ago

@hipsterelectron To make it go faster! Which occurs to me how it was original explained to me, WASM is using the only thing in JS that is fast- bit operations. Now Bash is slow, but if we wrote an application in Bash using only bash bit operations, we could make bash fast too. BASM.

James Felder

@somethingcat@fedia.social 3 hr. ago

@mistersql@mastodon.social @hipsterelectron@circumstances.run I remember hearing something about an earlier version of WASM which was written in JavaScript (I think it was called asm.js), so it has some history coming from a definition of “what is fast in JS” instead of that being a coincidence.

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@somethingcat @mistersql that wasm was made into not a fast subset of JS but a completely distinct and in fact incompatible runtime could be viewed as an active attempt to avoid subversion of the web platform, much like ES2016 sought to displace coffeescript without adopting anything but some of its surface syntax (indeed actually merely complicating the web platform without achieving safety)

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 3 hr. ago

@somethingcat @mistersql i'm allowed to say this because i added the five new forms of lexical scope to coffeescript necessary to model ES2016. it was fucking heinous

d@nny disc@

@hipsterelectron@circumstances.run 7 hr. ago

thx to @amy for relating the horrors