No, but one of the goals of WebAssembly is to have a textual representation, so in theory you could still View Source. Not sure how that'll work out in practice, though.
In practice, I think most browsers won't include a "disassembler", under the justification that most users won't need it; I can see "View Source" unfortunately going that way too.
What's wrong with that argument is the fact that although most users don't need it, it's an excellent way for those interested to explore into and find out how things work, and essentially get into web development with nearly no effort. If this trend continues, in the future when browsers become nothing more than dumbed-down interactive TVs, I think there will be very few, if any, web developers who started out of their own interest and exploration instead of solely thinking of it as a profession, and that's a really bad thing. (For the corporations who want to take control, this could be viewed as a good thing - why would they want to encourage independent thought and exploration when they could have dogmatic obedience?)
Computing systems are becoming more closed and proprietary, and this will be a big step backwards in terms of openness of the Web that lead to its growth and freedom in the first place.
> I think there will be very few, if any, web developers who started out of their own interest and exploration instead of solely thinking of it as a profession
If that were the case, why do people get interested in programming in any non-interpreted language without thinking about it as a profession? I have trouble seeing this as a big step backwards in this regard since there are plenty of non-interpreted languages that kids in high school have gotten interested in themselves, even when there wasn't nearly as many good resources for learning them online.
I also don't see a huge difference between Web Assembly and minified javascript. Sure, with the later you could in theory piece through it without a disassembler, but if that is your introduction into the language I doubt you'll learn much at all (or want to). The gap grows even smaller when you take into the account the fact that Web Assembly is desired to replace asm.js, which was already incredibly obfuscated.
> Computing systems are becoming more closed and proprietary, and this will be a big step backwards in terms of openness of the Web that lead to its growth and freedom in the first place.
Web assembly was developed publicly from pretty much the very beginning on GitHub. We live in a world where the biggest closed-source players have open sourced implementations of their programming languages/platforms, compilers and all (e.g. OpenJDK, .NET Core, Roslyn, Swift). There are no popular languages around now where the leading implementations aren't open source. If this is what "becoming more closed and proprietary" looks like, then I can't say I'm opposed.
> In practice, I think most browsers won't include a "disassembler", under the justification that most users won't need it; I can see "View Source" unfortunately going that way too.
Thankfully for the openness of the Web, developer tools have been a source of intense competition among browsers. I see no reason why this will not continue to be true for introspection of Web Assembly.
Back in my day we didn't have compilers, we twiddled the switches until the machines did what we want. Compilers just allow sub-par programmers to write code, we should better abolish them.
doesnt need to be the original source, as long as every browser has some form of decompiler to high level language (C like) Im good. But I cant imagine a future where we are served blobs with no way of knowing whats inside.
I don't see how but the OP mentions 'something similar to map files' for debugging. So the map files are like pdb for (msvc) C++.
I wonder if it hadn't been easier if we'd just gone with sandboxed, auto-updated native applications rather than taking a 15-year detour through html, dhtml, 'ajax' web 2.0, spi w/ 'compiled js' and now this...
I fail to see how obfuscated textual blobs are any better. It's not like I can get any useful information from thousands of lines of gibberish JavaScript. As a sibling pointed out, WA supports textual representation.
