It doesn't play golf at the club with the C level.

This and plenty of other problems that plague the society now and over the past centuries could be solved by eliminating the distinction and gap between "rich" and "poor".

You can call JS in which you can manipulate the DOM.

Of course architecturally (also regarding your file access) it's better to use the wasm for logic as much as possible where the web (HTML/JS) provides the UI and IO, data flows into wasm for work and results flow back to the web.

This also has the benefit that you can keep your original C/C++ source code much more platform agnostic which helps reusability and testing.

> You can call JS in which you can manipulate the DOM.

Well sure. But for me, the promise of WASM was to make the browser "just another platform". Now it's "this special platform where you have to access some of the most important functionality through FFI interop with a very high-level, very opinionated language".

> Of course architecturally (also regarding your file access) it's better to use the wasm for logic as much as possible where the web (HTML/JS) provides the UI and IO, data flows into wasm for work and results flow back to the web.

OK, but like, I wanted the browser to be "just another platform". I don't want to use JS, and I consider HTML orthogonal to my logic. I realize that's not where we're at, but that's what I dreamt of. Hence my disappointment. Which is OK, I don't matter :)

> This also has the benefit that you can keep your original C/C++ source code much more platform agnostic which helps reusability and testing.

It feels the opposite to me.

Hmm well I guess I don't quite get what counts as "just another platform." Surely every platform is going to have the native APIs that you need to abstract over. Why is WASM different?

Is it just a matter of WASM being too new to have full featured wrappers and APIs for your language of choice?

Yeah it's like how if you want a cross-platform UI in C, you kinda need to use something like SDL that abstracts away the platform specifics. Even then might be hard for everything to work.

Web is "just another platform" with its own specifics, and the advantage is multiple OSes can run that platform pretty much the same way.

JS in the web context is what C or assembly is in the native context: something you have to use, because it's the foundation the platform is built on, and every language needs a way to interact with it, and good languages support it inline when you need it.

Trying wasm is still on my todo list, but this sounds like how I'd expect it to work

Because the longer software is out in the wild, the more vulnerabilities are found. At least when they're found in windows 11 they should be patched

Yeah and it took about 150 years until industrial revolution started to actually benefit the common people and the workers started to have their working conditions improved.

What it took was social democracy and unions and other social movements.

Saying that "it's happened before, it'll be alright" is a bit naive and short-sighted.

It took a literal civil war, which you don't read about in history books so much because it's not beneficial for the owners of those publishing houses to have more people hear about it. Lots of people died on both sides.

> which you don't read about in history books so much

Just to clarify, are we referring to the American Civil War? The reason I ask is that the idea that it is not a topic that is broadly covered in history books and discussed at depth all throughout schooling is simply false.

No, I'm talking about the anti-union violence. This stuff, happening all across the economy, was a civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike

Anti-union violence was a "literal civil war"? Yeah, no it wasn't.

User entering wrong input is a logical condition and typically handling a logical condition (point being it's not an error from the software's operational point of view) using tools that allow easier logic flow (i.e. error codes) etc.

Out of memory error can happen in many environments because for example in C++ it's about the allocator. You might have a custom allocator with some limit that has no bearing whatsoever what the OS does.

  * Use asserts/panics for bugs.
  * Use "error codes/values/enums" for logical conditions (that are errors to the user, not errors to the software)
  * Use exceptions for unexpected errors in the execution of the software (normally more or less just resource allocation failures)

I don't know, but maybe spending 15 years working on something that you felt was not only a job but also in part a mission shapes a lot of you as a person and you want to express your feelings about that huge part of your life.

I can't speak for the author but I can say that I left companies or institutions on my own despite loving both the (idealized) mission and the team.

I wanted to stay but the strategy was wrong, to my own moral compass.

Consequently leaving in silence, without being able to express why, and maybe even what could possibly be fixed, feels like giving up.

Leaving while telling whomever might want to hear what problems were, and possibly how to fix them, helps to move on while being truthful.

Oh, the irony...

I would say about 99% of the population views software corporations as these monolithic inhuman cubes of pure shitanium. What these posts are important for is

1: reminding the average population that corporations are just abstract human pyramids and made up of normal people.

And

2: doing that through a very human, biased, and filtered perspective that can provide some genuine insight into the function of these opaque systems.

Now, does the average consumer of hacker news get all that? Probably not, but I do think insider perspective is still valuable.

Gstreamer is a multimedia framework where the user creates media DAGs by placing video/audio/multimedia elements such as demuxers, decoders etc in a pipeline. The framework then takes care of running the media pipeline and handles the data buffering etc.

Within the framework there are multitudes of plugin packages that contain said elements and many of them are built on top of ffmpeg.

Sorry but how exactly does the sandboxing help? You download and run an app that you expect to be useful and that you need. The app needs permission to access your data. If you want to use the application what choice do you have except to grant it access?

Point being you wouldn't run untrusted code in the first place and for "trusted code" you end up accepting it's access requirements anyway.

So logically I'd think that the malware would just get piggy bagged into actual non-obvious utility apps and nothing is gained.

Second problem is that the security model hoops make for terrible APIs and user experiences. Just look at the current filesystem browser APIs. It must be mentally challenging to design APIs to Be usable and the nerf them for security purposes to make them "not too usable".

Finally one must note that at least right now the webasm ecosystem is rather immature and the de-facto only tool (emscripten) is an amateur hour hobby project. So it's going to take some decades still before the tooling is really getting there.

> The app needs permission to access your data. If you want to use the application what choice do you have except to grant it access?

But it doesn't need network access to be useful, so it doesn't have that permission and can't exfiltrate your data?

In general, what's three point of a link to a sandbox in a conversation about the benefits of sanboxingm

But specifically, this sandbox also kills all interop with your system, other apps/utilities, so way too disruptive for the purpose of isolating just from the network.

Just like any WebAssembly runtime, without imports of external functions, the code can only warm CPUs.

So? Will they not have imports of external functions?

The point being that WASM doesn't improve anything over sandoxing native applications, on the OSes that actually are serious about it.

It should confine itself as the evolution from browser plugins.

So it does improve since the OSes are not actually serious about it otherwise they would've fixed these basic usability concerns years ago.

I haven't said such thing.