Agreed on the stdlib concept. I'm sure people are working on it, the benefit would be massive. Just the amount of mobile data transfer that could be saved by 1MB of software pre-distributed to all browsers would be huge.
I wonder if anyone is trying to do it based on the javascript integrity hashes. In theory, if you took the top 100 javascript libraries and established a blessed build pipeline that would produce reference builds that would be bundled to the browser, and if anyone loaded a resource with an integrity hash matching the browser's pre-installed versions, it could just load from disk instead. That would give people who can tolerate less frequent library releases the ability to use all that functionality without networking related page load costs, and would provide a fallback since CDN's could host the file anyway if the browser doesn't have it.
Just the amount of mobile data transfer that could be saved by 1MB of software pre-distributed to all browsers would be huge.
That would be great. I’m normally a fan of multiple competing implementations, but this might be an area where a single common library implementation, developed in partnership by all browser vendors, would be beneficial. All the code would be in wasm so it would be portable by definition. And with everybody using exactly the same implementation there shouldn’t be any sneaky incompatibilities. With a single master repo it could be versioned and updated cleanly.
Just as long as it’s kept small (1MB sounds like a good goal) and there isn’t too much churn -- those are the real challenges.
Yeah agreed, it is extra complicated since it requires coordination between browsers and also enough websites to make it worth it. If it were released today it could take years to register in i.e. global internet statistics. I guess in theory shared CDN's and caching should be almost as good as well if major website could agree on dependency sharing.
I wonder if anyone is trying to do it based on the javascript integrity hashes. In theory, if you took the top 100 javascript libraries and established a blessed build pipeline that would produce reference builds that would be bundled to the browser, and if anyone loaded a resource with an integrity hash matching the browser's pre-installed versions, it could just load from disk instead. That would give people who can tolerate less frequent library releases the ability to use all that functionality without networking related page load costs, and would provide a fallback since CDN's could host the file anyway if the browser doesn't have it.