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Why? What is the advantage of abstracting everything from the raw CPU so much and now treating JavaScript as CPU op codes? And wasn't that computing model all

Why? What is the advantage of abstracting everything from the raw CPU so much and now treating JavaScript as CPU op codes? And wasn't that computing model all the range 40 years ago, with "big iron" (less powerful than my phone now) mainframes that lived far away and dumb terminals (essentially a keyboard and a screen with very little processing happening locally)? Are we saying computing is so hard that people can't be trusted with a real computer? Everything needs to be on someone else's computer and you are only allowed to have a locked down browser locally? I don't get this everything old is new again trend. And how enthusiastic today's kids are about their grandfather's computing model.

pcwalton 10y ago
> Why? What is the advantage of abstracting everything from the raw CPU so much Portability (and not just between architectures--between operating systems as well). > and now treating JavaScript as CPU op codes? Web Assembly does not treat JavaScript as "CPU op codes".
bluejekyll 10y ago
Pcwalton's response is good. I'll add that I think your confused about what I am saying. In the JavaScript world, the single page app is really just a pure client side app, no different than an app dedicated to Windows like Word. The difference is that it targets web standards for building applications, in a sense the browser is the operating system and application development environment that the OS used to provide. The key is that it's a standard, and should work the same across platforms. The fact that it's on the web is just a delivery platform for the software. Webassembly will bring the performance of these browser based applications to be on par with any native application. It's the write once run everywhere development that we've all wanted since the promise that Java made. I do think that there is a benefit to this model over Java, which is that it's more flexible than Java was in allowing for design choice, and many more languages (in large part thanks to the LLVM).

pcwalton 10y ago

> Why? What is the advantage of abstracting everything from the raw CPU so much Portability (and not just between architectures--between operating systems as well). > and now treating JavaScript as CPU op codes? Web Assembly does not treat JavaScript as "CPU op codes".

bluejekyll 10y ago

Pcwalton's response is good. I'll add that I think your confused about what I am saying. In the JavaScript world, the single page app is really just a pure client side app, no different than an app dedicated to Windows like Word. The difference is that it targets web standards for building applications, in a sense the browser is the operating system and application development environment that the OS used to provide. The key is that it's a standard, and should work the same across platforms. The fact that it's on the web is just a delivery platform for the software. Webassembly will bring the performance of these browser based applications to be on par with any native application. It's the write once run everywhere development that we've all wanted since the promise that Java made. I do think that there is a benefit to this model over Java, which is that it's more flexible than Java was in allowing for design choice, and many more languages (in large part thanks to the LLVM).