[HN Gopher] Debugging WebAssembly with Modern Tools
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Debugging WebAssembly with Modern Tools
Author : feross
Score : 129 points
Date : 2020-12-10 13:44 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (developers.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (developers.google.com)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| Awesome! This is the web summit talk I was looking forward to. So
| part of the promise of wasm is its integration with the web api
| and dom. In the fractal application for example if we extend that
| to include a zoom function that handles mouse events and updates
| variables, I'm probably employing something like blazor or js-sys
| in rust. How will that high level integration be handled in the
| dev console? And is it possible to create custom visualizations?
| Thanks in advance ;)
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I just tried it and it works pretty well. Awfully slow on my
| mid-2014 MacBookPro though, especially the variable-view-panel
| redrawing takes very long (1..2 seconds). But definitely a
| promising new start compared to the older source-map debugging
| solution.
|
| Hopefully this will also lead to a 'seamless debugging
| experience' inside VSCode. It would be pretty awesome to have
| (for instance) a HTML panel with a WebGL canvas in one VSCode tab
| while stepping through the C/C++ code in another tab. With a bit
| of tinkering this would also make a nice shadertoy-style live-
| coding environment.
| kowbell wrote:
| Not WebAssembly related, but there are already VSCode plugins
| for "a nice shadertoy-style live-coding environment!"
|
| GLSL preview:
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=circlede...
|
| Full on Shadertoy environment (preview panel, lets you use
| Shadertoy's uniforms):
| https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stevenso...
| RReverser wrote:
| Interesting, are you on the latest Chrome Canary? If so, could
| you please report a bug with a simple repro to the
| https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/entry?template=D...
| link mentioned in the article?
| rhencke wrote:
| I never that the tools I used for tracing (chrome://tracing) and
| now debugging C/C++ code would be my web browser itself.
| worik wrote:
| Although I have no use for it currently I am fascinated by Web-
| assembly (and PWAs). But is it actually useful? I understand why
| theoretically it is, but is it being useful in practise?
|
| Answering my own question, a little, I use figma.com a lot. But
| the potential seems so great, and the available PWAs so poor....
|
| Expecting this is a good place to ask
| brundolf wrote:
| It's mainly hamstrung right now by the hoops you have to jump
| through to get it talking to the actual web page, is my
| understanding. Some companies though, like Cloudflare, are
| playing with it as a cross-platform server/desktop runtime,
| which is interesting
| merb wrote:
| webassembly would be a good thing to have extensions within
| your app via wasmer/wasi unfortunatly not many languages are
| going into webassembly
| qwertycrackers wrote:
| I'm coming at with from a similar place as you; I think it's
| really cool but the benefits are somewhat fringe for normal web
| apps.
|
| I'm currently writing a SPA in WASM just because I want to play
| with trendy tech, and the biggest benefit I have observed is
| massive code size improvement. A similar app I wrote using
| React had an uncompressed bundle size of about 2 Mb (ouch),
| which gzipped down to 400 kb. The wasm competitor is about 150
| kb and 90 kb gzipped, which is a pretty good code size savings,
| although still a little bloated. I also strongly prefer the
| Rust development experience over Typescript, even though TS was
| perfectly serviceable and the WASM-browser interface is still a
| little unpolished (but still quite capable). Overall my
| experience tells me WASM has a strong future but we are house
| on the bleeding edge of usability at the moment.
| Birch-san wrote:
| It's absolutely useful in practice. Sometimes the library you
| need was written in C++, and needs to run performantly and
| offline. I needed WASM and PWA to make an offline Japanese
| dictionary: https://birchlabs.co.uk/mecab-web/index.html It
| uses WASM to do linguistic processing via the C++ library,
| mecab. It tells you where the spaces should go in a Japanese
| sentence, and what the dictionary form is of each word (so you
| can lookup the meaning).
| RReverser wrote:
| > Answering my own question, a little, I use figma.com a lot.
| But the potential seems so great, and the available PWAs so
| poor....
|
| It's just that WebAssembly, like any new technology, can and
| usually is used in very specific paths that require it.
|
| As a result, it's true that there is not that many full
| WebAssembly-powered PWAs, although the ones that are, like
| Figma you already mentioned or Google Earth or various Blazor-
| powered apps already speak for themselves.
|
| However, there is even more apps and websites out there that
| use Wasm either directly or via library dependencies for
| calculations, graphics or even things like hyphenation - in my
| research https://github.com/mnater/Hyphenopoly was one of the
| most popular Wasm-powered libs used across a bunch of CMS and
| blog platforms - probably the last place you would expect to
| find WebAssembly in, and yet...
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