W3C Posts Initial WebAssembly 2.0 Working Drafts

[phoronix]

Phoronix: W3C Posts Initial WebAssembly 2.0 Working Drafts

WebAssembly as the W3C standard for a portable binary-code format for executable programs on the web and elsewhere continues seeing exciting new use-cases for speedy web applications and even desktop purposes. This open standard continues advancing though and the first public working drafts of WebAssembly 2.0 were published today...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=WASM-2.0-Public-Drafts

[bug77]

Nice. I don't understand exactly what's in store, having read the spec in a hurry, but it seems it will make passing around structs/objects easier than before.

[marios]

Will it finally work without JavaScript? I mean can you have pure wasm without a single line of js code? I hope yes, but seeing it is written by w3sux I am not so optimistic.

[NobodyXu]

Will it finally work without JavaScript? I mean can you have pure wasm without a single line of js code? I hope yes, but seeing it is written by w3sux I am not so optimistic.

If you are going to run wasm directly on your machine without web browse (as an alternative to JVM for C/C++/Rust), then no.

For web browser, you probably still need glue code in Javascript, thought maybe it can be auto generated?

[bug77]

Will it finally work without JavaScript? I mean can you have pure wasm without a single line of js code? I hope yes, but seeing it is written by w3sux I am not so optimistic.

That has little to do with W3C standards. To run WebAssembly without the JS bootstrap, you don't need a spec anymore than you need a spec for browsers to run JS without a C/C++ bootstrap.
Frankly, I don't see an urgent need for that. JS bootstrap has the added benefit that you can block WebAssembly with existing tools, like NoScript.

[miskol]

It will be nice to have a option to do more stuff from webassembly.
For example for frmeworks like Qt and tools like libre office we can't access local fonts from browser.
It will be nice to have it virtualized from file system

[NobodyXu]

It will be nice to have a option to do more stuff from webassembly.
For example for frmeworks like Qt and tools like libre office we can't access local fonts from browser.
It will be nice to have it virtualized from file system

I recall that wasm has a capacity based filesystem API that makes it trivial to sandbox applications.

[bug77]

It will be nice to have a option to do more stuff from webassembly.
For example for frmeworks like Qt and tools like libre office we can't access local fonts from browser.
It will be nice to have it virtualized from file system

Well, that's what this update is about: doing more stuff from WebAssembly. But the emphasis is on security, so additional stuff is added little by little.
Full disclosure, I've never tried WebAssembly outside the browser, I have no idea how that goes.

[megatux]

Exceptions support and some research on threading seems like great additions. Especially for some languages reqs. Is some kind of Memory management expected to see the light?

[tildearrow]

SIMD looks interesting. Hopefully this will bring WebAssembly performance closer to native.