web assembly suggestion

[quangkieu]

Hi,

I wonder if anyone suggested this before but I would like to raise awareness about using web assembly for web-client-based application as web assembly is somewhat implemented on all major browsers. I am not asking using it, I just want to raise awareness about it, play around with the idea to see how far it could be use.

[vankasteelj]

if what I read about it is true, it could be beneficial for us to use it to handle heavy stuff like video decoding and swarm connections, but we're relying mostly on node because of it's capacity to handle the filesystem of the host pc. We're not a browser-based app', we're stuck with nwjs/electron or other similar hybrids for now, because of the security sandboxes in mainstream browsers.

[xaiki]

and those are handled by our libs.
most of the butter code is UI, no real benefit from webassembly there.

[quangkieu]

I was thinking butter could become something like VLC alternative without installation, just load the web and everything ready (with cache for offline work). If butter could pull it off, it would become popular and right next VLC.

About the technical, I agree that most of heavy stuff is handled by npm libs but then again we could find some other open C lib to do the heavy lifting like @vankasteelj suggested for browser-based app and apply the Butter UI on top.

[xaiki]

@vankasteelj is working on a local-files provider