SAsatoshinm·Jun 2, 2017
> It seems there is this effort to get C/C++ code performing fast inside of a browser... then at the same time there seems to be an effort to get people to stop coding in C/C++ altogether and switch to something more memory safe.
WebAssembly offers a compelling "alternative": instead of (or in addition to, if you desire) writing in memory-safe languages, with all the cost that incurs, you can write in unsafe languages and the consequence of memory errors is limited by the sandbox.
This approaches the problem from a different direction, on one side we have e.g. Go and Rust. Go with garbage collection and its overhead, or Rust with zero-(runtime)-cost abstractions which push the burden onto the programmer at development time. C compiled to WebAssembly is low-overhead but safer than native code, giving the benefits of both worlds.
I would ha
Read the rest
ve never expected it, but now believe C is the language of the future for the web. Built on decades of history with an unbeatably large existing codebase, extensive analysis and tooling support, standardization, raw power without the shackles of safety, yet confined to limit damage by the browser sandbox. True cross-platform compatibility with powerful HTML5 web APIs.
My experience about a month so far developing a C application compiled to WebAssembly/asm.js using emscripten has been surprisingly smooth. I can compile and test natively, including enabling the clang static analyzer or -fsanitize=address and -fsanitize=undefined to find bugs endemic to C, fix them and then deploy and run on the web. For the most part I can code directly to OpenGL and GLFW, which emscripten bridges to WebGL and other browser APIs seamlessly. I had to contribute a handful of fixes to emscripten, as well as an implementation of glfwJoystick to the HTML5 Gamepad API (also working on file drop and monitor API), but this was straightforward and easier than expected, emscripten happily accepted the patches. There are Rust (https://github.com/thinkofname/steven) and Go (https://github.com/thinkofname/steven-go) applications in this problem space but porting a similar application written in plain C (https://github.com/fogleman/Craft) to emscripten was nearly trivial (if there is any interest: https://github.com/satoshinm/NetCraft). After about a week I was able to consider the web-based port finished, and then focus on developing new features, for both web and native.
Is C compiled to WebAssembly a panacea? Not by a long shot, there are many (perhaps most) scenarios where memory-safe languages such as Rust would be preferred. But for games and other programs where performance is more critical over correctness and safety, WASM is a godsend.