Opinions on technologies like WASM.

[u/babasankaradi]

I recently came across Photopea an was surprised by its usability and perfomance that too in a browser.I'm curious to hear the thoughts and experiences of developers here regarding Technologies like WebAssembly (WASM) and Google Native Client (NaCl). These technologies have been gaining attention for their ability to execute high-performance code in web environments.

​

1. Have any of you worked with these techs in your projects? What was your experience like, and do you see any specific advantages or limitations compared to other technologies?
2. Are there any specific applications or use cases where you believe NaCl or WASM particularly shine? Whether it's gaming, computational tasks, or other areas, I'm keen to learn about real-world scenarios where these technologies excel.

[u/BhupeshV]

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[u/BhupeshV]

WASM is the only thing I have been intrigued about amongst all the random stuff that catches on in our industry.

• Last I checked only Figma was using WASM (big product). Would love to try it someday.

• Dart also rolled out support for WASM.

• I was playing with ebitengine in Go. All examples are loaded in WASM

[u/exequias-ulqui → u/BhupeshV]

Adobe's new revamped UI for Photoshop on the web heavily uses WASM, or so I've read.

[u/BhupeshV → u/exequias-ulqui]

Adobe's new revamped UI for Photoshop

Didn't know about this

For others: https://medium.com/@addyosmani/photoshop-is-now-on-the-web-38d70954365a

[u/alex_ken_101 → u/BhupeshV]

Webassembly can be used instead of docker . It is better .I have heard on some old talk on YouTube about it.

[u/BreadfruitRich2175 → u/alex_ken_101]

Webassembly code is built using super optimised llvm compiler (ahead of time compilation) Docker is glorified package container manager supporting many configuration, languages and bash; saving us useful time but docker doesn’t usually deal with compilation so they are two completely separate technologies

[u/BreadfruitRich2175]

Webassembly(wasm) was initially designed and implemented by Mozilla developers and later open-sourced. I was one of the early adopters for wasm in India to apply machine learning and deep learning models on browser.

Emscripten helps you port the c++ applications to webassembly. Webassembly code can run as fast as native applications .

Remember that browser only understands js or html but Vanilla js is slow hence converting existing c++apps to wasm(js)was the most effective way to get desired speed and performance boost at cost of some security concerns.

Emscripten now supports other popular languages such as go and rust . Webassembly is like ChatGPt for FE developers. They are the biggest losers out of it, Now companies can hire a smart developer and use legacy code

[u/alex_ken_101 → u/BreadfruitRich2175]

Nowadays browsers shipped with webassembly core right ?

[u/BhupeshV → u/BreadfruitRich2175]

Interesting, would you be interested in hosting a WASM workshop on our discord (like a virtual talk)?

[u/exequias-ulqui → u/BhupeshV]

Hey, can you count me in for the talk as well?

[u/BhupeshV → u/exequias-ulqui]

As in, you want to join as a host/speaker?

[u/exequias-ulqui → u/BhupeshV]

Lol no, I'm nowhere near as qualified to present a talk for this matter. But yeah, I wanted to be present in the talk.

[u/xXWarMachineRoXx → u/BhupeshV]

Sure

[u/AnonymousD3vil]

I know this is bit of self promotion, but I've recently built a JS library that can run LLM models on browser: https://github.com/rahuldshetty/llm.js

It uses emscripten project to target C/C++ to WASM binaries. See a lot of great potential and can improve the whole web frontend development

[u/elekktronic]

Blazor is also using WASM, but the JavaScript is still required to dynamically update content in a webpage when using WASM in modern browsers, it increases overhead and reduces performance. So, I think JavaScript getting replaced by WASM is still quite not possible, maybe they'll complement each other.

[u/[deleted] → u/elekktronic]

but the JavaScript is still required to dynamically update content in a webpage when using WASM in modern browsers

Umm...what?

[u/elekktronic → u/[deleted]]

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/calls-between-javascript-and-webassembly-are-finally-fast-%F0%9F%8E%89/

I'm not a web developer btw...

[u/[deleted] → u/elekktronic]

I have worked with blazor. I know what js interops does. We don't necessarily use js interops calls everytime and tend to avoid it. Unless the requirements are such that direct dom manipulation is needed, there is no need to use js just to update a component.

[u/elekktronic → u/[deleted]]

So that is what stopping WASM from replacing JavaScript completely right?

[u/[deleted]]

As per my benchmark with Assemblyscript, it took ~480ms for a simple for loop for a billion iterations, almost half a second and ~80ms when done in wasm. I'm using it for a simple image processing tool on web

[u/Whatisanoemanyway]

Practically the final nail in the coffin for software that runs locally

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[u/puninspiring]

Web animation is a huge area that'd benefit from wasm. Unfortunately there aren't many popular frameworks utilising it for that purpose.

If webgl could switch all it's mathematical stuff to wasm, I'd love to see that

[u/BreadfruitRich2175 → u/puninspiring]

Webgl is a different backend and wasm is another backend. On the contrary Webgl is 10x faster for complex mathematical and graphical operations.

[u/exequias-ulqui → u/BreadfruitRich2175]

Yeah, I saw the video where someone tried to use WebGPU for complex calculations and then try to use it in JS. But, the cost of calling the code in JS land (via a "portal" as he said) was so much, that it wasn't worth it.

I have also read a few blogs where OpenGL code in C++ is run in browser via WASM using emscripten.

[u/BreadfruitRich2175 → u/exequias-ulqui]

WebNN is future of web. It combines wasm and Webgl seamlessly. Large deep learning models such as transformers will be easily accessible to edge computing applications on browsers

[u/BreadfruitRich2175 → u/exequias-ulqui]

Wasm runs on cpu and webgl uses small computing threads on gpu. Gpu is more efficient for parallelism of small complex computing workloads so as to achieve much higher throughput. CPU are efficient for solving super heavy traditional computing tasks

[u/exequias-ulqui → u/BreadfruitRich2175]

Indeed. That is why it's difficult to go from traditional synchronous programming to GPU programming, where you have to think about each pixel at the same time, no top-bottom data flow.

[u/akash_kava]

WASM is great, and we are using it for many things today, most of JavaScript packages are getting converted to WASM. For example we are using WASM for md5 hash etc, face recognition - tensor flow, ocr - tesseract. Somehow it is the best technology today as any native code can easily fit into JavaScript and we can interact it easily without having to go through install/setup.