doom-sokol VS website

Doom is actually quite easy to build because the source code is already structured to keep the platform-specific parts isolated (Doom was developed on NeXT workstations and then 'downported' to DOS.

For instance here's my WASM port of the Doom shareware version. This is a fork of doomgeneric, which itself is a fork of fbDoom - but midway through I noticed that all the abstractions added by fbDoom and doomgeneric are actually not very helpful for a WASM port that should run in browsers, and that I probably would have been better off forking the original source instead):

Github repo: https://github.com/floooh/doom-sokol

Hosted version: https://floooh.github.io/doom-sokol/

Here are a couple of real-world examples, these are all C/C++ code bases which run across Linux, macOS, Windows, iOS, Android and in browsers without porting:

Home computer emulators: https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/

CPU simulators for Z80 and 6502:

https://floooh.github.io/visualz80remix/

https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/

The shareware version of Doom:

https://floooh.github.io/doom-sokol/

Samples for the cross-platform libraries this stuff is built on top: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/

WASM (and asm.js before it) turn the web into "just another platform" for cross-platform code bases written in any language that can compile to WASM, and that's pretty great.

I started my WASM DOOM port (https://floooh.github.io/doom-sokol/) from doomgeneric which was helpful at first, but since I had to 'slice' the various modal loops in Doom in order to make it work in a frame-callback app model it wasn't all that helpful in the end unfortunately.

My porting notes for anyone interested: https://github.com/floooh/doom-sokol#porting-notes

Also note that that webpage can be somewhat out of date; for instance, see here for some recent edits to it (e.g. features Node had implemented that were marked as unavailable): https://github.com/WebAssembly/website/commits/main/

I would also say that IF blazor worked on a browser plugin like silverlight did, today that's not the case it is built on the webassembly standard which and it is being adopted in the browsers which means once it gets on the web, it is unlikely to ever go out again. Even if Microsoft themselves leave Blazor today, it can still work, the burden of creating a fork and keeping blazor alive will certainly be big but someone will be able to do that, just like the open silver folks revived silverlight via wasm tech without any particular Microsoft involvement.

Moreover, Tsavo and Rutvik also highlighted some ongoing and upcoming improvements in Dart, such as the isomorphic capability, compiling to WebAssembly, and how it has allowed us to communicate with JavaScript code effectively.

WebAssemblyOpen external link (abbreviated as “Wasm”) is a binary format that many languages can be compiled to. This allows you to write Workers using programming language beyond JavaScript, such as Rust, C, C++, Go and more.

In this post, we'll write a server-side Javascript function and then build it into a WebAssembly binary using the open source Spin tool. Our code will be less than a dozen lines long in total, so this is a concise introduction to WebAssembly and serverless functions that won't require you to spend a lot of time figuring out a code sample.

You might've noticed the increasing chatter around WebAssembly (WASM) in the dev community. Its potential is vast, and we've found it invaluable in enhancing our open source project!

WebAssembly.org: nice collection of resouces.

It's a meh deal.

They should've stuck with "this is crossplatform bytecode for the web", and it would've flourished there. Instead, now it's "designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the web for client and server applications." [1]

Servers! Applications! Tigers! Lions! Oh my!

And it's not particularly good, or effective, or performant at any of those.

[1] https://webassembly.org

Today, the idea of optional code-on-demand execution in Web sites, in most cases, is violated. W3C introduced Web Components to extend HTML tags but made it entirely dependable on JavaScript. All modern Client-Side libraries, like React.JS, Angular, Vue.JS, are built with JavaScript. Sun Microsystems introduced Java Applets based on JVM. Adobe presented Macromedia Flash with a browser extension. Microsft made it possible to run reduced .NET applications in a browser with the Silverlight extension and recently introduced Blazor, which compiles C# code to WebAssembly and executes it on the client side.