Nostr Web Client

Chromium has merged the WebAssembly interpreter submitted by a Microsoft Edge engineer:

https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/v8/v8/+/5509903

Once this reaches a Chromium stable release, Vanadium will support WebAssembly by default instead of requiring turning on JS JIT via drop-down site settings. Example of a site using it is Mutiny Wallet.

Chromium has a V8 Optimizer toggle for disabling the 2 optimized tiers of the Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to greatly reduce attack surface. However, it doesn't disable baseline JIT and therefore still does dynamic native code generation. They did this to avoid breaking Wasm.

In Vanadium, our JIT toggle fully disables the JIT and therefore currently loses Wasm support. An increasing number of sites are depending on Wasm with no fallback to JavaScript. Most of these sites perform perfectly fine with only the fast V8 interpreter and no JIT compilation.

Vanadium has JIT compilation disabled by default as part of the security focus. This Wasm interpreter will be a nice usability improvement for sites depending on it with no fallback code since users won't need to toggle on the JIT compiler for the site unless it performs badly.

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

ponymontana💜⚡ 1y ago

thats cool

ponymontana💜⚡ 1y ago

no, I rethinked about that, I'm disturbed by the circular bullshit here:

1) my website need to do computationally intensive tasks, so need wasm to do it efficiently.

2) I dont provide a interpret-based fallback becasue I dont intend to provide my service trough it, I choose wasm as a requirement.

3) lets put another giant piece in the chrome codebase just to inefficiently interpret code that is not intended to be interpreted.

I dont think is bad overall that chromium and vanadium adopt it, I think that a code project that add this kind of stuff with this kind of logic is doomed to ever be insecure, frequently zero-dayed, less and less manageble and customizable by third party (and individual users) and a giant pile of uncomprensible garbage.

Chromium is at one more giant new commit to solve the security problem as government is at one more regulation to solve inflation