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W3C confirms: WebAssembly becomes the fourth language for the Web šŸ”„ What do you think?

Shahjada Talukdar on December 17, 2019

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) brings a new language to the Web as WebAssembly becomes a W3C Recommendation. Following HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,...
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Nick Holmes

I'm not a fan of JavaScript, but there was no credible alternative. In principle, I now have a choice of language, so long as it can target WebAssembly. This is a big deal.

As a concrete example, the prospect of being able to use a .Net Core stack and tooling end-to-end is very attractive. The potential for stream-lining development is huge. It's early days yet, but I expect WebAssembly (via Blazor) is going to be extremely popular in Microsoft shops.

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Shahjada Talukdar

I am pretty sure, Microsoft devs will pick only Blazor for WebAssembly and no other languages.

As Micsorost has a huge number of developers worldwide, the popularity of Blazor will be really high!

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Josiah Roa

Iā€™m really curious on what could be accomplished on the web with this change. Also do you think full stack devs are gonna need to learn web assembly???

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Shahjada Talukdar

I am also looking forward to this.

For me,Full stack developer is a very broad term. You can be fullstack dev working with .Net, Ruby , Python or anything.

Or you can be fullstack dev with only JS.

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Bart Hermans

Microsoft has developped a layer on top of WebAssembly called Blazor. So for .NET devs it will be pretty easy to adopt WebAssembly.

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Shahjada Talukdar

I heard of Blazor. haven't tried it yet.
I will look on it.

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Andreas Jakof

No need to learn WebAssembly... at least when you are already using .NET and not as a new language itself.
The same goes for GO and others(?).

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Shahjada Talukdar

.Net introduced Blazor which can run C# code using WebAssembly.

dotnet.microsoft.com/apps/aspnet/w...

You can use Rust for WebAssembly. Not sure about Go yet.
Need to search on the web

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Andreas Jakof

Maybe I had it wrong, but I knew for sure that besides .NET, there are other candidates to use with WASM.

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Shahjada Talukdar

Yeah, Rust is a major candidate for it

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rhymes

Tools are still a bit unfriendly but they can only get better! Can't wait to see what they come up with because even though there's a very clear niche that benefits from Web Assembly I'm not sure it'll be massive soon and it's probably a good thing in the meantime.

Can't wait for WASI and what it'll come out from the byte code alliance though! hacks.mozilla.org/2019/03/standard...

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easrng

Another one to watch is the WASM interface types standard.

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Shahjada Talukdar

WASI seems very interesting in fact! Let's see...

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Andrew Houghton

Your numbering system is wonky by including HTML and CSS. Why not XML? Personally I would have said confirmed the second, JavaScript and now wasm which are programming languages vs. markup languages. Cheers.

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Shahjada Talukdar

I actually get your point about what you meant. You think HTML and CSS are not languages, right?

If so, then the abbreviation of HTML is Hypertext Markup Language, from that angle it means it's a language šŸ˜„

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easrng

HTML and CSS are languages, just declarative ones.

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Shahjada Talukdar

HTML and CSS both can be run natively in Browser, But not XML. That's why.

But the title "WebAssembly becomes the fourth language for the Web" was written by W3C(not me).

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easrng

Actually, XML can be natively shown if you use XSLT.

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Ben Halpern

Even though it's not like everybody is going to be writing WebAssembly all of a sudden, this is one of the more fascinating tech trends to follow. Could dramatically affect what we can do in the browser.

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Shahjada Talukdar

Yeah, also seems like other programmers (who can't write JS or don't want to write JS) will get the floor.
Also, performance benefits will be an addition

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Toma • Edited

WebAssembly is the equivalent of llvm for the web. And if you look at it, it is more of a compiler infrastructure. The need of learning it will be to the language developers or some of us that are doing deep stuff. If you look around everybody is doing something similar. Go has WA target. Android went aot in v5 I think, flutter dart compiles to native on mobile and desktop thanks to skia, Swift is llvm, not sure about c# on the desktop, Java has a library called Quarkus for llvm for the web, Facebook tried transcribing php to c, python has cython....

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Shahjada Talukdar

Didn't know about LLVM thing.
For others - llvm.org/

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Tim JK Strickland

Fascinating

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Shahjada Talukdar

Seems so!

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Shahjada Talukdar

Yup!

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spiritupbro

es2020 please also typescript