I think it is a valid concern to worry about code on the web remaining human-readable, and in fact we are being very careful about that, see this FAQ entry:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#will-webassembly-support-view-source-on-the-web WebAssembly will allow View Source, just like JS currently does. It will actually provide some benefits over the current situation: 1. Minified JS is currently almost impossible to read. Some browsers clean up whitespace for you, which helps a lot, but it isn't standardized. The WebAssembly text format will be standardized, and means all browsers will show a readable and consistent view source on wasm content. 2. asm.js is currently hard to read due to all the extra | 0 and + coercions, etc. The WebAssembly text format will be much cleaner, and much more readable. Note also that WebAssembly is an AST format. It has a binary version, but still encodes an AST, just like asm.js. So a human-friendly AST is being kept. Overall, WebAssembly is like asm.js, only better. It will not make things worse on human readability etc., it will only improve things there. - Alon On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 10:36 AM, Morgaine Fowle <[email protected]> wrote: > This sounds like the death of human runnable code on the web, and the end > of machine-to-machine interoperability that JS-as-target has given us. > Building a bunch of dev tools for a bytecode language is a shocking > prospect. This is a major major change, and I worry that the relative > thin-ness, the human-ness of the web is a thing that's made it great, > that's made it a preferred platform, and that this puts a very serious kink > in that. > > Emscripten has been great because it's targeted JS, and enriched it. But > with languages just focusing on a VM underneath, I worry the tech will > recede into various factional camps, with no interest in aiding the greater > web. I'm happy we have good new tech under development, this sounds like an > interesting effort, but it also opens very scary ends where the web becomes > as banal as every other native platform, as isolated and by itself, with as > little interest in enriching the greater whole as we see with everything > else not-Web, or without major embedding points (which I'd classify as > enriching, but in a single-serving capacity). Today's a major win for > machine to machine, but I worry that we're closing the door on people. > > Fair us all well. Expecting a report on devtools situations in this brave > brave new world soon, regards, yours, > rektide > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "emscripten-discuss" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "emscripten-discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
