You cannot escape the politics of browsers by going to WebAssembly, because that's where WebAssembly was born. To use features outside of the original WASM spec

You cannot escape the politics of browsers by going to WebAssembly, because that's where WebAssembly was born. To use features outside of the original WASM spec, you have to consult a table and perhaps use a polyfill, like with CSS or JS features. Browser implementers have a large influence on the direction of the VM. For example, around a year into the original spec's development, it switched from being based on an abstract syntax tree to being based on a stack in a decision made by the browser teams [1]. A big change like that, a year in! The s-expressions in the text format are an artifact of that period, since tools already relied on their existence for optimization. Anyone who writes a compiler or engine for WebAssembly is going to have to deal with the mess of web standards, unfortunately. 1. https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/755 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/755