![]() A rise in new applications of WebAssembly, and new paradigms that work better with WebAssembly may be the boost that Wasm needs to step into the limelight. The fact that WebAssembly’s initial adoption was not fast and furious does nothing to diminish its value. JavaScript’s first decade was a struggle until a few crucial browser innovations and Node/NPM gave JS developers new super powers. What was the magic bullet? We all know the answer: Rails. Ruby was a decade old before it caught on. We are just as eager to see venerable office suites, useful C libraries, and new programming languages come along. But that doesn’t mean that we think the LibreOffice news is in any way irrelevant to us. One could speculate on whether the o365 team may also be looking at this path forward.)įermyon’s immediate interest in WebAssembly is cloud-oriented. (If you have been paying close attention to WebAssembly, you’ll know that MS Excel in o365 has compiled some legacy C code to WebAssembly in order to avoid a costly rewrite but on a much smaller scale. Again, now demonstrated! LOWA is an example of a deep investment in WebAssembly. WebAssembly can be a vehicle for bringing mature code bases to the cloud without massive rewrites. WebAssembly can be used for large applications! It has now been demonstrated. We may be a year from seeing this come to fruition, but the potential here is undeniable.īut the victory extends beyond the story of an office platform. As users of Google Docs and o365, we would certainly welcome an office solution that provided nearly 100% parity between the online version and the desktop version. So we at Fermyon suspect that today’s preview may in fact be the first step toward something new. One does not put a year of work into demo-ware. There’s just a ton of work still to do, to make the LOWA LibreOffice really usable, so that will keep us pretty busy this year. Thorsten Behrens concludes his interview with a hint: What it is, though, we can only speculate based on the previously mentioned interview in which they referred to the project as LOWA (LibreOffice in WebAssembly). The folks at Allotropia very likely have a plan. LibreOffice is “brownfield” code that just leap-frogged from the past into the future. And because of this, LibreOffice in WebAssembly represents a major victory for a technology that has been considered fringe. It’s not a toy, not a “Hello World” program, not a high-performance micro-library, not a utility… it’s a full-fledged suite of tools. LibreOffice is an established, well-storied codebase with millions of lines of code. But LibreOffice represents a different trend. A handful of small WebAssembly tools have been built using QT. And the QT APIs have been improving over time. I first noticed it when I discovered an online version of an image slicing utility called PosteRazor. QT has had WebAssembly support for quite some time. LibreOffice uses the QT toolkit for its graphical user interface. QT is a mature and stalwart user interface toolkit behind many Linux desktop projects. And LibreOffice is a sign that WebAssembly’s moment is arriving. In other words, replacing JavaScript code with compiled (for example) Rust code has not been a valuable enough story. But this is deflecting attention from the more likely: the value proposition has just not hit the average “full stack developer”’s sweet spot. ![]() DOM support has lagged, as have key features like threading and garbage collection. One might be tempted to point fingers at the specifications, which seem to have crawled along. Two years ago, when we started investigating its potential, the most frequent usage we observed in the wild was, tragically, bitcoin miners running in the browsers of unsuspecting site visitors. The Underwhelming Promiseįor whatever reason, WebAssembly has been undeniably slow to catch on in the browser. And while Fermyon is focused primarily on the cloud side of things, we do think that (just as with JavaScript and Node.js) both sides of the network connection will benefit from pervasive use of WebAssembly. Why all the fuss?įor us at Fermyon, we see LibreOffice’s move as a strong indicator that WebAssembly is now poised to enter the practices of mainstream developers. ![]() And this came hot on the heels of the Fosdem session explaining WebAssembly for LibreOffice. The stories trended to the top of Hacker News. This comes after Thorsten Behrens of Allotropia gave an interview announcing WebAssembly support in LibreOffice. Why LibreOffice in WebAssembly is a Big DealĮarlier this week, demos began to circulate of LibreOffice (using the QT graphical toolkit) compiled to WebAssembly and running in the browser.
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