Author here: I'm sorry that you felt attacked by that line, I really tried my hardest to phrase it in a way that didn't assign any blame. I wasn't trying to im

Author here: I'm sorry that you felt attacked by that line, I really tried my hardest to phrase it in a way that didn't assign any blame. I wasn't trying to imply that the team wasn't thinking about these issues, just that real-world implementations of this kind of VM didn't exist yet and so many of the practical issues were difficult to see in advance. Many of your other issues I directly address in the article itself, for example that optimising compilers can recalculate the information lost when using locals (tl;dr: why recalculate this information when you could include it in the format) and that Wasm started as an AST machine. The JVM works similarly to Wasm, true, but it is generally considered a hybrid stack/register machine. I'd define Wasm as a similar hybrid. As for the multi-value extension, although that improves codegen for streaming compilers it doesn't reduce complexity unless locals are also deprecated. Something that I don't talk about in the article but that seems like it may be a problem going forward is that Wasm seems to have no mechanism in the format for major version bumps/breaking changes. Unnecessary things like locals and structured control flow (see the second article in the series) cannot be removed even when they are subsumed by more-general features.