davexunit's comments

On: I Wrote a WebAssembly VM in C

[davexunit]

And WebKit finally shipped it recently! Love return_call and friends.

On: I Wrote a WebAssembly VM in C

[davexunit]

Use the GC instructions and you can freely share heap references amongst other modules and the host.

[panic → davexunit]

How do you access the contents of a heap reference from JavaScript in order to “send it to a <canvas> or similar”?

[davexunit → panic]

Assuming you're talking about reading binary data like (array i8), the GC MVP doesn't have a great answer right now. Have to call back into wasm to read the bytes. Something for the group to address in future proposals. Sharing between wasm modules is better right now.

On: I Wrote a WebAssembly VM in C

[davexunit]

This was a fun read! I wrote a Wasm interpreter in Scheme awhile back so it makes me happy to see more people writing their own. It is less difficult than you might think. I encourage others to give the spec a look and give it a try. No need to implement every instruction, just enough to have fun.

On: Every System is a Log: Avoiding coordination in distributed applications

[davexunit]

My takeaway from this article is that the proposed solution for distributed app coordination is a shared, centralized log. What did I miss?

[azmy → davexunit]

IMHO the article is not mainly about the implementation of the Log, but rather leveraging on the idea of the log to build reliable and fault tolerant applications. The implementation of the log itself can be either centralised or decentralised.

[sewen → davexunit]

That gist is correct - I would add that the log needs a few specific properties and conceptually be the shared log for state, communication, execution scheduling.

The next step is the, how do you make this usable in practice...

On: WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics

[davexunit]

You can absolutely do graphics rendering with GC'd languages. The trick is the same as with manual memory management: Minimize allocation. You mention C# which is a language that has been used very successfully in the games industry.

[hoppp → davexunit]

Unity uses C# but the engine is written in C++, but you are probably right and there are other engines out there written in C#

On: WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics

[davexunit]

Hope my post didn't come across as complaining because I agree! Wasm is great right now for lots of things, just wanted to highlight a use case that isn't great yet.

On: WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics

[davexunit]

In Scheme what you want to do is allocate a big bytevector and use it over and over. This is what I already do outside of Wasm. I don't want or need linear memory involved, I just want access to my (array i8) from JS.

On: WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics

[davexunit]

Thanks for bringing a reasonable perspective to this discussion.

On: WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics

[davexunit]

Yes, I know there's more overhead on the web than native, but that is missing the point of my post. I'm talking about issues with Wasm GC relative to other ways of rendering with Wasm. I've played many browser games with good performance, btw.

[pjmlp → davexunit]

I would be interested in any that beats iPhone's demo of OpenGL ES 3.0 in 2011, Infinity Blade.

In real time graphics quality rendering that is.

On: WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics

[davexunit]

Perhaps I should've said this in the post to ward off comments from the anti-GC crowd but I do realtime graphics in managed memory languages just fine outside of the Wasm context. This is a Wasm problem.