Contrib.social

Remove the WebAssembly trial

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 8 November 2024, about 1 month ago

Problem/Motivation

The decision has been made by the product owner and tech lead of Drupal CMS that we will not be supporting a WebAssembly-based trial for now.

Why?

  • There are intractable technical issues:
    • Severe performance problems, particularly in the installer, that don't seem to have a single debuggable cause.
    • No compatibility with Safari due to Drupal's code base simply being too big for it to handle, even with unnecessary files removed. This is a browser-level limitation and not something we can work around.
    • Risky dependencies - the WebAssembly trial requires an alpha-level WebAssembly build of PHP maintained by someone outside the Drupal community.
    • The support code is (somewhat necessarily) idiosyncratic and quite unfamiliar to anyone who doesn't have strong backend Node experience. The bar to contribution is higher than it should be.
  • For our target users, it's unclear if there's a large benefit to trialing Drupal CMS via WebAssembly versus a smooth , polished, and above all fast hosted experience.

We will still have a trial experience, so this track isn't dead. It's just that we won't be using WebAssembly to do it, at least until it is better suited to our needs and there is a stronger justification for it.

I do want to publicly state, for the record, that this was amazing work, the stuff of utter sorcery, and nothing about this is meant to diminish how impressive of an achievement it was to get as far as we did. But we have to face the reality that a proof of concept, no matter how eye-popping, doth not a viable product make.

Proposed resolution

Remove the WebAssembly trial and all related infrastructure. In follow-up issues, we'll choose a platform on which we can deploy a hosted trial, and set up whatever is needed for that to work.

📌 Task
Status

Active

Component

Track: Trial Experience

Created by

🇺🇸United States phenaproxima Massachusetts

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