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I thought browser VMs lost (Flash, Applets, etc) or was that just because they weren’t open like WASM?

• pie_flavor 3y ago
  Flash and applets were replacements for visual sections of webpages, handling rendering, layout, and interactivity in a frame. WebAssembly is just code. (To put it another way: The JS browser VM hardly lost.)
• kaba0 3y ago
  They lost because they were ahead of their times -- the rest of the web tech were way behind and the best one could do was to put a canvas and render real interactive content there. In the meanwhile, web tech has improved considerably so now you don't have to manually render to a canvas, the DOM is expressive enough for many things, so integrating with JS instead of wholesale replacing it makes much more sense. But besides starting from a clean slate, escaping a few historical warts (e.g. 32bit types would not have that big of a support in a newly planned JVM simply due to hardware advancements), there is nothing significantly better or novel about it, in my opinion -- maybe with the exception of its history: it being closely related to asm.js is imo a very interesting tidbit.