DGdgb23·Jul 9, 2024
I found a discussion with some explanations to why that is and what other solutions could be looked at:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1184
In Dynamic translation of Smalltalk to WebAssemblyWebAssembly
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WebAssembly Design Documents
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I love the fact that they chose s-expressions for the textual representation of WASM[0][1]. [0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Underst... [1]:…
kuwze used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
- webassembly/spec · linked in 5 of the same discussions
- webassembly/interface-types · linked in 3 of the same discussions
- emscripten-core/emscripten · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:02:05 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year260 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-06-17 16:27:29 UTC to 2026-05-03 00:07:52 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 53 | 5 | 48 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 66 | 1 | 65 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 66 | 5 | 61 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 16 | 0 | 16 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 12 | 0 | 12 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 0 | 11 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 3 | 10 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesI should add, however, that the unmentioned elephant in the room is V8 JIT (TurboFan), which simply doesn't handle irreducible control flow. While there are some valid theoretical arguments around the current arrangement in Wasm, looking at the history of the associated discussions makes it pretty obvious that having V8 support Wasm and generate fast code similar to what it can do for asm.js was an overriding concern in many cases. And Google straight up said that if Wasm has ICF, they will not bother supporting such cases, so it will be done by a much slower fallback:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/796#issuecommen...
AFAIK no other Wasm implementation has the same constraint - the rest generally tend to desugar everything to (potentially irreducible) CFG and then proceed from there. So this is, at least to some extent, yet
Read the rest
another case of a large company effectively forcing an open standard to be more convenient for them specifically.
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1397
> Currently allocating more than ~300MB of memory is not reliable on Chrome on Android without resorting to Chrome-specific workarounds, nor in Safari on iOS.
That's about allocating CPU memory but the GPU memory situation is similar. The specs don't want to reveal information about how much memory you're allowed to use because it could be used for fingerprinting, but that means that it's practically impossible to build reliable applications which use (or can optionally use) a lot of memory. Every allocation you make past a few hundred MB risks blowing up the app immediately, or putting it into the danger zone where it's the first in line to get killed when running in the background, either way without any warning or last-chance opportunity to release memory to avert getting killed.
In Web AI Model Testing: WebGPU, WebGL, and Headless Chrome