JavaScript is already an old language from 1993 and quirky in that it doesn't have 64 bit integers. Webassembly inherits that so you can't really say it is a ne

JavaScript is already an old language from 1993 and quirky in that it doesn't have 64 bit integers. Webassembly inherits that so you can't really say it is a new platform. I don't see Rust making what you call a mistake. Rust has 64 bit and even 128 bit integers. 64 bit integers and pointers have a trade-off we need to consider: they need more memory. Out there are still embedded systems perhaps running on a tiny battery and having 16 bit memory, and it is wasteful to force 32 bit or even 64 bit data on them. So currently we have at least three different directly adressable memory sizes: 16 bit (up to 64 KiB directly addressable memory), 32 bit (up to 4 GiB directly addressable memory) and 64 bit (up to 16 EiB directly addressable memory, this is 4 billion times of 4 GiB, however currently platforms don't use all bits and don't have that addressability, for details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing#Limits_of_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit_computing#Limits_of_pro...).