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Immediately following that 'legacy' sentence is an explanation of what they mean by it: > WebAssembly started out not as a bytecode, but more like a simplified
by rkangel 8y ago
Immediately following that 'legacy' sentence is an explanation of what they mean by it:
> WebAssembly started out not as a bytecode, but more like a simplified binary representation for asm.js. Essentially it was originally designed to be source code, like JavaScript.
WebAssembly itself is relatively new, but it wasn't a completely blank sheet of paper that they were starting with when they designed it.
- benj111 8y agoYes and the next sentence finishes: "and only at the last minute did it switch to stack-based encoding for the operators" Which kind of counts against it being well designed. To me, "weighed down" by legacy suggests some deep problem that shouldn't be manifesting in something so young. You could argue that 2 years is a long time in tech, I wouldn't say it's a long time in language development though. Maybe I'm just arguing semantics here? Is a library for a particular language weighed down by legacy because it's designed to run on one particular language?