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He mentions Plan 9. Reading that Wikipedia lead to the Inferno operating system. Which mentions a focus on portability and a file interface. https://en.m.wikip

by ilaksh 3y ago

He mentions Plan 9. Reading that Wikipedia lead to the Inferno operating system. Which mentions a focus on portability and a file interface. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) That reminds me of web assembly and WASI. So this is tangential but how is the component stuff in web assembly doing? It seemed like such a great idea to me but apparently, at least at one point, was somehow controversial or political. Also, I wonder if it would be possible to port Inferno to web assembly.

pjmlp 3y ago
Basically WebAssembly is anything but new. You can also check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Workstations, USCD Pascal, Modula-2 MeDos, IBM AS/400, TenDRA, Taos, Oberon, among many others, that have had the idea of bytecode as portable OS binaries.
- ori_b 3y ago
  Though, wasm has a high level structure that makes it a clunky compilation target. The bytecodes above improve on wasm in that regard.
  - ilaksh 3y ago
    The high level structure is an advancement that is important for optimization.
    - ori_b 3y ago
      It isn't; the first thing production optimizers do is throw it away. It supposedly makes verification of SSA properties marginally faster, but that's not the bottleneck.