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The web solved software distribution. Full stop. There only remain the edge cases, and that's where webasm wants to help. Sun/Java wanted badly to solve this p
by javajosh 5y ago
The web solved software distribution. Full stop. There only remain the edge cases, and that's where webasm wants to help.
Sun/Java wanted badly to solve this problem, but tried to do too much too soon. Java gave devs in 1999 cutting edge OOP tools for doing GUIs (e.g. Swing) but distribution was always the problem. Installing and running browser plugins was always error prone, and it turned out the browser was itself just good enough to deliver value, so it won. (With the happy side-effect of giving the world-wide community of devs one of the gooeyist languages ever to express their fever dreams of what application code should be).
The question in my mind is whether there is enough demand for the kinds of software webasm enables, especially given that other routes of distribution (app stores) have filled in the gaps of what the web delivers, and are generally a lot more pleasant and predictable to native devs.