From Asm.js to WebAssembly
Does everyone think this is good news?<p>I'm all for making the web faster/safer/better and all that. But I am worried about losing the web's "open by design" nature.<p>Much of what I've learned and am learning comes from me going to websites, opening the inspector and stepping through their code. It's educational. You learn things you may never read about in tutorials or books. And it's great because the author may have never intended for their code to be studied. But whether they like it or not, other people will learn from their code, and perhaps come up with [occasionally] better versions of it on their own.<p>This has helped the web development to evolve faster, and it's obvious how democratizing this "open-by-design" property is, and I think we should be concerned that it's being traded away for another (also essential) property.<p>Human beings cannot read asm.js code. And a bytecode format will be more or less the same. So, no matter how much faster and more flexible this format/standard is, it will still turn web apps into black boxes that no one can look into and learn from.