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  • It would be cool if the POW could be done ahead of time. That way I don't get stuck waiting while I'm working. Some type of credit/tokens that my browser could then spend.
    by 0x696C6961
  • It's wild to me that PoW systems are how we sort the bot problem... the bummer is that all this "work" is just wasted cycles, at least in crypto there is a token you can sell.
    by chews
  • > something I was doing with my "strict MVP" build of Anubis' WASM wasn't in fact sticking to just the MVP features of WebAssembly

    Fun fact, this _used_ to be the case - wasm32-unknown-unknown had extra non-mvp features added later, which in my eyes has been a breaking change on stable. You're not the first person to have been bitten by this, there's [1] and a similar story in Ruffle [2].

    Weirdly, the response from the rustc side (IIRC we also talked with one of the devs of wasm component on discord a bit around 2024) has contained a lot of (paraphrasing) "in retrospect we think wasm32-unknown-unknown target was designed badly*, so we'd prefer if you either dealt with it or switched to another wasm target <with its different set of downsides> than us fixing it". (*I acknowledge that the way std was implemented on that target was unusual and "not clean", but it works _really well_ for a lot of people.)

    > I looked into the process involved for rebuilding the standard library twice: once with only MVP wasm features enabled and once with an "all yes config" like usual. Based on some research I did this seemed like a massive pain.

    That's what Ruffle does [3], it's a bit unfortunate but wouldn't call it a massive pain.

    [1] https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/can-we-have-either-a-new-t...

    [2] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/pull/18397

    [3] See lines 55 and 117-127 in https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/blob/6890c618daab3153343...

    by adrian17
  • You can use Rust's `wasm32v1-none` target to get baseline WASM with no extra target features. (This restricts you to `#[no_std]`, however.) https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/wasm32v1-no...
    by Georgelemental
  • Is there a place where I can try out if my browser is compatible? Easier to find out now than when I'm trying to get work done and a million websites now have it deployed

    On https://wasm-feature-detect.surma.technology it shows that I don't have 3 of all these features but I'm not sure if Anubis needs any of them to not kick me back to the pure JS solution

    Which would apparently be bad because

    > The WebAssembly that's shipped with this flow is ridiculously performant. This may mean you need to adjust the difficulty [upward, to avoid that bots solve it trivially when they support wasm, I assume this means]

    combined with

    > The wasm2js flow doesn't currently have a way to update the progress bar [so you have no clue about remaining time]

    (wouldn't be the first time that I gave up on a page because it was stuck on 0 hashes per second)

    by Aachen
  • Hats off to Xe for spending so much time on backwards compatibility, especially the tidbit about targeting Chrome 66.

    I have a Mac from 2014 running Yosemite that I occasionally use to test for backwards compatibility in my own frontend code (for fun!). But IMO the best way to ensure compatibility is to use period-correct toolchains or toolchains where the pace of change is slower, like ClojureScript.

    by kccqzy
  • I have every copy of Firefox here configured with webassembly disabled...because I don't tend to do what Webassembly was designed for, i.e. online games, video/audio editing, emulation, etc. [1] and because I dislike things running in the background without my knowledge.

    So this is going to be interesting.

    My plea (in a small voice) to the OP: just as many sites still do for JavaScript, please add a "This captcha required Webassembly to continue" message to your code when Webassembly is disabled. And, incidentally, for smaller platforms/browsers that don't offer a Webassembly engine at all.

    [1] https://webassembly.org/docs/use-cases/

    by doctor_radium
  • > In my experience the kinds of people who run this exact combination of circumstances also tend to be the kind of people that have a wide variance in the level of kindness they display to the authors of open source programs that happen to be in their way.

    Love this. There’s been past discussion on HN re how OSS maintainers are treated, and this is such a wry sentence. I really appreciate the tone / attitude to the problem.

    by vintagedave

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