3 ms·

Looks like we're well on our way to a somewhat overly complicated reimplementation of thin binaries[1] [1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10

• saagarjha 7y ago
  We had that already with the JVM and CIL. They never caught on in the browser.
  • coldtea 7y ago
    No, we had a VM / runtime environment with those. Now it's much closer to the metal.
    • yellowapple 7y ago
      The more relevant improvement is that it's better-integrated with the browser; Java and Silverlight both had pretty horrendous user experiences (and the latter wasn't even usable outside Windows without hacking Wine/Mono into a browser plugin, e.g. Pipelight). The sandboxing story also seems to be much stronger with WASM than either of those (where sandboxing felt more like an afterthought at best). In other words: WASM still relies on a runtime/VM, but the difference is that the runtime/VM is astronomically better for the intended use case (and also, incidentally, a presumably-unintended use case) than most existing runtimes/VMs.