On Tue, 27 Dec 2016 at 19:46, Vitor Medina Cruz <vitormcruz@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Is the Pharo team aware of the http://webassembly.org/ effort? The Browser Preview tentative is for Q1, do you think it is a good opportunity to push Pharo to web development more easily? I know next to nothing of VM binary (lol), but I am curious on how one could provide an Smalltalk (in this particular Pharo) application in the web using webassembly, as the project is aimed to broaden the development choices to something different than Javascript or Transpilers (which I profoundly wishes to succeed since I hate js) .
Thanks, VItor
From the little I know it may be possible to port Cog VM to WebAssembly , compiling the C sources through emacscripten. As always things are more complex in practice than it may seem.
WebAssembly would be more meaningful for front ends because you can run whatever you want on back ends. web dev on front end is not doing very well with both mobile and desktop platforms dominated by native apps. Pharo is already native , so unless you really want it for websites to replace JavaScript , but we already have PharoJS , squeakJs and amber for that, you don't need it. Personally I think for Pharo is more important to have official releases for iOS and Android. JavaScript wise I think we are well covered. So no I don't think webassembly matters as much for JavaScript as it matters for other languages. If you really care about performance just make an app and release it on Mac, windows, Linux, android and iOS app stores. This the route most popular web orientated apps go nowadays ,like Slack, Dropbox, Netflix etc. We actually do this side ways and embed a web browser to your app , which I think will be far more flexible than a website with webassembly. I think for now we have to wait and see.