No installation required: how WebAssembly is changing scientific computing

<i>&gt; Some would use laptops, others would opt for tablets or mobile phones. Not all of them could even use the programming language that was the subject of the test: the statistical language R. “We had no control, really, over what devices those students were using,” says Stagg.</i><p>Surely the problem here is much bigger than WebAssembly vs native code. What does it even mean to give students a test on using a software package if they aren&#x27;t even willing to buy a computer? How are you supposed to do professional stats work after university on a mobile phone? They don&#x27;t even expose a file system.<p>Learning how to use a full workstation-class computer is a basic pre-requisite of doing science and many other types of professional work; these universities are just hopelessly lost if they&#x27;re not making that clear to students up front and requiring or provisioning the equipment they need. Degrees awarded on the back of tests like these are worse than useless, they&#x27;re outright deceptive to future employers. If someone claims they studied scientific computing and then turned out to not understand files, folders, packages, multiple windows and other basics then they&#x27;d be completely unable to do the job.

&gt; For instance, modern operating systems can handle 64-bit numbers. WebAssembly, however, is limited to 32 bits, and can access only 232 bytes (4 gigabytes) of memory. Furthermore, it cannot directly access a computer’s file system or its open network connections. And it’s not multithreaded; many algorithms depend on this form of parallelization, which allows different parts of a computation to be performed simultaneously. “A lot of older code won’t compile into WebAssembly, because it assumes that it can do things that can’t be done,” Stagg says.<p>I am surprised by the memory and 32 bit limitations... Are there plans to overcome them?<p>Edit: found it, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WebAssembly&#x2F;memory64">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WebAssembly&#x2F;memory64</a>

We had code execution in the browser over 25+ years ago, with Java applets. Sure, they were bloated and sluggish back then. On today&#x27;s hardware, you wouldn&#x27;t even notice.

Don&#x27;t see this happening scientists are totally happy installing R or Matlab etc. Often a lab even sticks with windows b&#x2F;c of some drivers for a sensor that only exists for windows

Yet another advocacy article with absent of what came before.