from the NOO-GOD!-NO.-GOD.-PLEASE.-NO.-NO!!!-NO!!!-NOOOOOO!!! dept.
Mozilla partners with Intel, Red Hat and Fastly to take WebAssembly beyond the browser – TechCrunch
Mozilla, Intel, Red Hat and Fastly today announced the launch of the Bytecode Alliance, a new open-source group that focuses on “creating new software foundations, building on standards such as WebAssembly and WebAssembly System Interface (WASI).”
Mozilla has long championed WebAssembly, the open standard that allows browsers to execute compiled programs in the browser. This allows developers to write their applications in languages like C, C++ and Rust and have those programs execute at native speed, all without having to rely on JavaScript, which would take much longer to parse and execute, especially on mobile devices.
[...] The mission of this new group goes beyond the browser, though. It wants to establish “a capable, secure platform that allows application developers and service providers to confidently run untrusted code, on any infrastructure, for any operating system or device, leveraging decades of experience doing so inside web browsers.” The argument here is that there is plenty of potential for WebAssembly outside of the browser because it allows untrusted code components to interact with trusted code inside of a sandboxed environment. Indeed, a Mozilla spokesperson noted that WebAssembly has generated more interest from businesses that are interested in this use case than from the traditional application developers and web technologists. Hence this new alliance.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @04:30AM (5 children)
remember:
PASCAL P-code
Java
now WebAssembly
every generation gets to re-invent bytecodes
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @04:52AM (1 child)
Real bytecode has never been tried before! And then there was the Java bytecode ASIC.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by shortscreen on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:43AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Pino P on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:48PM (1 child)
One difference between JVM and WebAssembly is that WebAssembly isn't under the legal control of One Rich American Called Larry Ellison.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @10:17PM
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday November 14 2019, @11:59AM
WebAssembly is WebActiveX, not P-code. That's why around half of all web sites use it for malicious purposes [infoq.com].
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:18AM (1 child)
No, not that obligatory, this one: "I have a bad feeling about this."
Response: "Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on, or firing your blaster into the floor?"
Worth a try.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:40AM
Meh, the only blaster actually available is a Nerf one. Big deal.
I'll tell you what to do, though: turn it off and let it in that state. Like, forever.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by captain normal on Wednesday November 13 2019, @07:00AM (2 children)
Gee, what could go wrong?
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:29AM
No more browsers one can trust
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:41PM
So which browsers will be reliable, then? Vivaldi, Konqueror, perhaps PaleMoon, any others?
Actually, there are a few others, but they are too simplified in their handling of bookmarks, and some even in their handling of images. (ASCII art browsers are nearly useless for most sites.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by bmimatt on Wednesday November 13 2019, @07:07AM (3 children)
This sounds to me like a path towards the equivalent of the thin client concept we've seen in the past.
Perhaps the idea here is to run 'container-like' workloads on the client.
This sentence: "...potential for WebAssembly outside of the browser because it allows untrusted code components to interact with trusted code inside of a sandboxed environment..." is a load of crap. A nice, steaming pile.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:51PM (1 child)
Would it be better to instead provide native executable and say "Sorry! We don't currently support your operating system" to anyone running an operating system other than the one for which the executable was built, such as users of macOS or GNU/Linux?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @04:53PM
Native Windows malware under Wine is much less probable to escape the sandbox, than bytecode ones with WebAssembly will.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 13 2019, @03:58PM
Indeed, which is why it's one of the major selling points of a technology that just wants to be yet another gatekeeper.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday November 13 2019, @07:53AM (5 children)
Something no competent user has ever asked for.
Oh, but the ad companies, they love this stuff.
No. If I'm scratching at port 80 I'm looking for a document. If you want to send me a compilable program, that's fine, that's a document, but there shouldn't be any be any way for it to jump around me and compile itself.
Mozilla is cancer. I'm ashamed I once gave them money.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:54PM (4 children)
First of all, webassembly is not to run compiled programs, it is to replace javascript's usage as bytecode and remove the stronghold Google has on the web. If you haven't hear of asmjs, what are you doing commenting on this topic before reading a little?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 13 2019, @06:50PM (3 children)
The article seems to disagree with you:
--
That's not really mutually exclusive with running compiled programs. Java already contorts its terminology to avoid calling what it spits out "compiled", but it is; it's just targeting a virtual platform instead of a physical chipset.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 13 2019, @06:52PM (2 children)
On further examination, I'm not sure whether *you're* the one confusing Java and JavaScript, or if this is some sexy new abomination of JS that I'm not familiar with. A JS script is not "bytecode" by the definitions I'm familiar with.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @07:16PM (1 child)
There are things that "compile to javascript" so while its not "bytecode" in that it's asci characters, its minified javascript which is about as readable as bytecode/assembly with all the whitespace removed.
Lists of things that "compile to javascript":
https://www.sitepoint.com/10-languages-compile-javascript/ [sitepoint.com]
https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-languages-that-compile-to-js [github.com]
and many, many, more...
(Score: 3, Informative) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 13 2019, @09:04PM
I can write a program in Brainfuck, but that doesn't mean the source is compiled rather than interpreted.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by darkfeline on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:18AM (1 child)
> confidently run untrusted code
I have a space station to sell you.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Wednesday November 13 2019, @05:45PM
That's not a contradiction, but it *does* require that you have a huge amount of trust in the sandbox that you run the code in. So far every jail or sandbox or virtual machine has turned out to have flaws that allow escaping, so having that trust isn't exactly reasonable, but it's not a logical contradiction.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bot on Wednesday November 13 2019, @09:05AM (4 children)
lol
- luser
- wat
- here get some wasi
- why
- because you can run stuff safely sandboxed in the browser
- who guarantees that
- red hat intel and guys, plus mozilla, the guys who gave you extensions and then removed it to reach feature parity with chrome, because hey we get money from google after all
- no fucking way
- there will be games, and interactive porn
- but but
- and it's sandboxed in the browser
- ok ok... hey the browser wants to access the webcam the hard disk and connects to the net bypassing the dns and without standard dedicated ports
- our work here is done
1. use the browser as an os
2. get minions to create an ecosystem
3. boot directly to the browser (we all know that faster booting can justify even the holocaust)
voila', another blow to gnu/linux and Free software in general because if android has been proven difficult to fork, the continuously updating web standards plus a web browsers monoculture is even worse. website ain't done til gnu won't run.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:25PM
The next windowing environment, like XServer, will be written in a browser. And then desktop environments will be written to customize your browser experience. And then an untrusted code trusted browser will be coded. By the WebAss Coalition between Opera, AMD, Debian and Gluttonly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:44PM (2 children)
hey I think you are a real person who is not a shill, I can tell because you are demonstrating the ability to think outside of a paper bag.
To me, this looks like they are trying to completely bastardize the concept behind Qubes.
Not unlike how Libra tried lol to bastardrize bitcoin.
'here try our totally fucked corporate version made by the cia, but with marketing and built by entities less than 0 degrees removed from spy agencies.'
At this point they are confident apparently that people like us will be ignored, they control all of the major platforms normies use, through which people like us appear to be utter loons.
That they can even get 100 programmers to work for mozilla and eat this shit up without asking questions is astounding to me, makes me wonder if they have working androids who can code anything but have their skepticism removed genetically.
Or they could be aliens, who are going to eat our brains once their plans are complete, or who knows what, but I can't believe there are this many remaining high iq/low discernment human beings on our planet who trust red hat intel and mozilla at all whatsoever.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:05PM (1 child)
There will never be a shortage of smartasses that want a ferrari out their IT job.
If you think about all the unreasonable and unfriendly things happening in IT between hardware software and infrastructure, the IT guy coding things to simplify his and his peers life is the exception.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Thursday November 14 2019, @10:02PM
Exactly, my viewpoint is underrepresented, I think unfairly, so I am being loud.
One of the main points to everything I am doing right now is to advise the mercenary bitchin camero drivers that the world he/per gets to spend his money in, with babes and vegas and playstation, will not be there any more if the entire system degrades into totalitarianism and ecocide.
How can they otherwise not see they are building a completely untrustworthy system that will offer no intellectual autonomy?
Do they know they are building skynet/borg tech? Do they think this will benefit them somehow in their old age?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nuke on Wednesday November 13 2019, @09:35AM (3 children)
Forget WIndows vs OS X vs Linux vs BSD - its over.
From now on it will be WebAssembly vs Systemd vs Facebook.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday November 13 2019, @12:30PM (2 children)
If it run emacs, it's fine. One can awlays code their own browser in emacs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @07:20PM (1 child)
Or use one that's already in emacs: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eww.html [gnu.org] Why reinvent the wheel yet again?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 14 2019, @05:59PM
Well once a browser is somewhat approaching compatibility it's established tradition to come up with a new, different one.
Account abandoned.