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   Mark Gritter (markgritter@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 09:50:23 JST Mark Gritter

   I am an old now because I remember the last time "run compiled code in the browser" was a thing. But I'm not sure anybody else does, with all the takes about how running a virtual machine (and Java!) in the browser is such a great thing?

   Is there a good historically-minded writeup about how #WebAsssembly differs from the last browser VM hype cycle?

   • Embed this notice
     silverwizard (silverwizard@convenient.email)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 09:50:22 JST silverwizard

     in reply to
     @markgritter Honestly, yeah, this
   • Embed this notice
     Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 09:59:25 JST Glyph

     in reply to

     • Jason Lefkowitz

     @markgritter @jalefkowit “faster per-page startup time” is, I think, the bottom line. And better performance in general but a lot of that comes from computers being ~100 times faster than they were the last time we tried

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 09:59:25 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Glyph
     • Jason Lefkowitz

     @glyph @markgritter @jalefkowit
     All that, plus (1) no DOM access; applets had their own canvas and couldn’t meaningfully interact with the rest of the page (at least not until they were effectively dead), and (2) they required a separate plugin, not installed by default, so devs couldn’t count on them being available.

     Though to Glyph’s point about startup time carrying the day: Flash had the same two shortcomings but made it much further by having a lighter footprint.

   • Embed this notice
     silverwizard (silverwizard@convenient.email)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 12:43:33 JST silverwizard

     in reply to

     • me
     @me @markgritter WASM is Java applets but they also can run HCF
   • Embed this notice
     me (me@social.jlamothe.net)'s status on Monday, 13-Nov-2023 12:43:34 JST me

     in reply to
     @markgritter Have they just reinvented Java applets? I remember in the 90s, thinking that those were the future.