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> WebAssembly is full of potential. Eh... from what I can tell from a mostly casual glance at it (enough for a half-hearted half-complete attempt at writing my

> WebAssembly is full of potential. Eh... from what I can tell from a mostly casual glance at it (enough for a half-hearted half-complete attempt at writing my own VM for it), I'd say that it is almost a good idea. A lot of the base concepts show a lot of potential, but I feel like the implementation is full design-by-committee derp. Why are there only 32 and 64 bit types? Why are there parametric instructions at all? Why is there no instruction for shrinking or freeing a memory? Why does binary format layer 0 use LEB128 instead of a fixed-width number? Just a bunch of weird stuff like that. But I'm hardly an expert on JIT or VM implementations, so I could be way off base here.

enos_feedler 5y ago
Even if it's weird and designed by committee, at least we have agreement with all browsers. IMO, WebAssembly has got over the biggest hurdle: agreement in a format to feed an abstract processor to program it to do math. Nothing more, nothing less. In the web ecosystem, the most powerful thing right now is agreement. The design might be ugly or weird, but it works and it's done. Lets build on top of it.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  Frankly, fuck the web. It's a warzone where Google throws its weight around to enhance the ability of advertisers to make our lives terrible. I was more interested in WASM as a universal VM for all platforms, but it doesn't fit nearly as well for that as it could because of some of the strange decisions this web-focused committee made. At least Java was also designed to run on not-the-web.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    Yes, I am as well. But anything built on top of wasm to run everywhere should probably at least operate well inside a browser environment. Almost as an incubation environment for something bigger. The browser platform is too big to ignore. We rise up from Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc!!! Here and now!!! We Rise!

enos_feedler 5y ago

Even if it's weird and designed by committee, at least we have agreement with all browsers. IMO, WebAssembly has got over the biggest hurdle: agreement in a format to feed an abstract processor to program it to do math. Nothing more, nothing less. In the web ecosystem, the most powerful thing right now is agreement. The design might be ugly or weird, but it works and it's done. Lets build on top of it.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
Frankly, fuck the web. It's a warzone where Google throws its weight around to enhance the ability of advertisers to make our lives terrible. I was more interested in WASM as a universal VM for all platforms, but it doesn't fit nearly as well for that as it could because of some of the strange decisions this web-focused committee made. At least Java was also designed to run on not-the-web.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Yes, I am as well. But anything built on top of wasm to run everywhere should probably at least operate well inside a browser environment. Almost as an incubation environment for something bigger. The browser platform is too big to ignore. We rise up from Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc!!! Here and now!!! We Rise!