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0 pointsmmastrac6y ago0 comments

Respectfully, that's a stretch - WebAssembly + (display tech) is a completely different stack in the browser. Houdini is bolting on a bunch of imperative stuff directly inside the browser engine with knock-on effects up and down throughout all of the web umbrella technologies.

With a wasm+web hybrid, there's a clear separation between the imperative wasm bits and the declarative web bits, so you can even combine them in ways that allow both stacks to perform well.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

pjmlp6y ago· 3 in thread

Houdini is not that much different from CSS Shaders.

I don't consider it a stretch, as I see a future where Flash gets its revenge and HTML is only used to import the starting WASM module, like on those Qt WebAssembly demos.

mmastracOP6y ago

> Houdini is not that much different from CSS Shaders.

CSS shaders, like GL shaders, are declarative programs that look somewhat imperative. The GPU makes the decisions on how to shard/distribute those.

As for your second point, I agree to some degree. I don't necessarily see an issue with it - the two different models make sense in different places.

stefco_6y ago

I tried those too... after three seconds of waiting and watching the "Downloading..." message with no app loaded, I felt the same dreadful feeling I used to get when I'd see a Java applet. I'm sure there are some use cases that will benefit from this, but I'm bummed thinking about how much crap is going to be needlessly delivered in a clunky way if we return to that HTML-as-bootloader app paradigm.

pjmlp6y ago

Just like all those SPAs used to display text.

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