design-principles
interface-types
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design-principles
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The Risks of WebAssembly
I am skeptical of WebAssembly and component-model myself, but that AssemblyScript page seems alarmist and as can be seen in several issues, dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322
It seems most of the complaints are that selecting UTF-8 as a primary string encoding is "against the practices of the web", which seems patently absurd. I was definitely expecting more along the lines of object models integrating into componentโmodel, rather than mass-tagging people because of string encodings.
- Do not design around third-party tools unless it breaks the Web
- New principle: Do not design around 3rd party tools unless it breaks the Web
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An Urgent Notice from AssemblyScript
I don't agree with your representation that sanitisation of isolated surrogates constitutes "corruption". As a high-level point, when passing a string from your component to an external one, the external component receives a sanitised copy of your string - the original string is not modified in-place. So you still have access to your original string if you're relying on the presence of isolated surrogates for some reason.
For fairness, I will link below to your concrete example of "corruption", noting that you claim it will render Wasm "the biggest security disaster man ever created for everything". The fundamental bug is in splitting a string at a point which happens to be between two code points which make up an emoji. This kind of mistake can already cause logic and display errors in other parts of the code (e.g. for languages with non-BMP characters) independent of whether components are involved.
interface-types
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WebAssembly Playground
Some things that might greatly increase wasm usage and overall tooling:
1) Tools that run docker containers and serverless function services (like AWS lambda) to support providing a .wasm files instead
2) Garbage collection in the runtime to make GC languages easier to port to wasm
3) Dynamically typed languages (NodeJS, Python, Ruby) being able to compile to webassembly directly instead of porting the runtime to webassembly and then running the code through the runtime. This is a big ask though, basically needs to redesign the runtime completely
4) wasm-DOM bindings will enable other languages to do HTML rendering which will require new web frameworks for every language that wants to take over the space from JS. This will lead to (even more) fragmentation of the web ecosystem
5) A new wasm-first SDK (unrelated to the DOM) for building cross platform applications. I can see this taking off only if it is built-into the browsers and backed by some standards committee, so not very likely I think
6) Something like the Interface Types proposal ( https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/main/pro... ) becomes a thing allowing wasm programs to be consisted of modules written in several different languages and being able to call said modules with low or 0 runtime performance hit (and of course, no compilation to multiple CPU archs). So much of programming ecosystems are locked to specific languages (like data science with python) when there is little technical reason for it be like that.
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Bring garbage collected programming languages efficiently to WebAssembly
AFAIK GC is irrelevant for "direct DOM access", you would rather want to hop into the following rabbit hole:
- reference types: https://github.com/WebAssembly/reference-types/blob/master/p...
- interface types (inactive): https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/main/pro...
- component model: https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model
If this looks like a mess, that's because it is. Compared to that, the current solution to go through a Javascript shim doesn't look too bad IMHO.
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Rust & Wasm (Safe and fast web development)
I'm not really optimistic that particular aspect will get much improvement. Many people expected interface types to come save the day, but after a looong stagnation that proposal has been archived (for now) in favour of component types, which has much less potential for performance gains.
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Plugins in Rust: Wrapping Up
Really good questions. Unfortunately, most of the issues I found back then were fundamental ones. I've seen that Wasm has deprecated "Interface Types" and is now working on the "Component Model". But even then, as far as I understand that would only avoid the serialization and deserialization steps, and you would still need to copy complex types. It will be more performant, but I don't think it would be enough for Tremor either.
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When moving from JS to WASM is not worth it - Zaplib post mortem
wasm doesn't know anything about the outside world on purpose. This allows it to be used in other domains. For direct access to the DOM et al, interface types are being developed. It's a non-trivial problem to interoperate with a dynamically typed GC'd language from any statically typed no-GC language that can compile to wasm.
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WebAssembly 2.0 Working Draft
You may want to look into WASM interface types, which is defining what amounts to am IDL for WASM and different languages have common calling conventions: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/08/webassembly-interface-type...
I donโt know if thereโs a better intro article. I believe this is the current iteration of the proposal: https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/main/pro...
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Replace JS with Rust on front-end, possible? Advisable?
Yes, and if I'm not mistaken, this is the RFC
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Google Chrome emergency update fixes zero-day used in attacks
I see no reason why not. See the interface types proposal for a proposed solution.
- Rust for UI development
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Front-end Rust framework performance prognosis
Wanted to get thoughts from the Rust experts on this - the author of the Yew framework seems to think that Web Assembly Interface Types (https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/master/proposals/interface-types/Explainer.md) will allow Yew to eventually become faster than Vue, React, Angular, etc. Is there general consensus on this in the Rust community? The prospect of mixing Rust (for the performance critical pieces) with TS on the front end doesn't seem super appealing to me.
What are some alternatives?
assemblyscript - A TypeScript-like language for WebAssembly.
stringref
gc - Branch of the spec repo scoped to discussion of GC integration in WebAssembly
proposals - Tracking WebAssembly proposals
Blazor.WebRTC
ASP.NET Core - ASP.NET Core is a cross-platform .NET framework for building modern cloud-based web applications on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
meetings - WebAssembly meetings (VC or in-person), agendas, and notes
wasm-fizzbuzz - WebAssembly from Scratch: From FizzBuzz to DooM.
memory64 - Memory with 64-bit indexes
Theseus - Theseus is a modern OS written from scratch in Rust that explores ๐ข๐ง๐ญ๐ซ๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ฎ๐๐ฅ ๐๐๐ฌ๐ข๐ ๐ง: closing the semantic gap between compiler and hardware by maximally leveraging the power of language safety and affine types. Theseus aims to shift OS responsibilities like resource management into the compiler.
design - WebAssembly Design Documents