This is my new favorite comment for illustrating the perilous future of general computing and how it needs to be taken away from JavaScript if we have any chance of survival. Electron, Webassembly fetishism, the pursuit of language synchrony at the expense of common sense, it all gets you this. This comment. Right here. This is the future of software and it should scare the shit out of you.
Let me get this straight: you realized latency was a concern, so you wrote in C/C++ (which, exactly?), then turned it into wasm so you can run it in a Web worker? What the hell was the point of that? That’s like saying you bought an M6 and converted it to a foot-powered bicycle. What exactly do you think wasm does? You seem to be implying that you think the native engineering you invested in continues to matter, in the same way, after you do that. You also imply heavily that you understand the wasm you’re executing to still be native. Do you think that? Do you understand what you’re giving up in the Web worker? As in, directly tied to latency and real-time requirements, your whole reason to go native in the first place?
Whatever your response is, deep down, you and I both know it’ll be justification to do Web things for Web’s sake. I know this because everyone I’ve had this discussion with has played the same notes (imagine the deployment model!) while failing to understand that they’re justifying their preference. The only people who build Web stuff want to build Web stuff. In the high performance sphere, of which DSP is a very mature practice, this looseness with the fundamentals of software is going to put you out of the game before you’re even started.
Let me get this straight: you realized latency was a concern, so you wrote in C/C++ (which, exactly?), then turned it into wasm so you can run it in a Web worker? What the hell was the point of that? That’s like saying you bought an M6 and converted it to a foot-powered bicycle. What exactly do you think wasm does? You seem to be implying that you think the native engineering you invested in continues to matter, in the same way, after you do that. You also imply heavily that you understand the wasm you’re executing to still be native. Do you think that? Do you understand what you’re giving up in the Web worker? As in, directly tied to latency and real-time requirements, your whole reason to go native in the first place?
Whatever your response is, deep down, you and I both know it’ll be justification to do Web things for Web’s sake. I know this because everyone I’ve had this discussion with has played the same notes (imagine the deployment model!) while failing to understand that they’re justifying their preference. The only people who build Web stuff want to build Web stuff. In the high performance sphere, of which DSP is a very mature practice, this looseness with the fundamentals of software is going to put you out of the game before you’re even started.