From the day WebAssembly was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9732827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9732827 The Web is an evolving syste

From the day WebAssembly was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9732827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9732827 The Web is an evolving system too large and long-lived for any single company, stable consortium, or standards body capable of doing the deed to do it, so none of Java, Flash (AVM), .NET/CLR, NaCl/PNaCl, Dart, and others I have forgotten about ever had a chance to take over. JS got out first and evolved through several jumps into https://asmjs.org/ https://asmjs.org/, a typed (as in static types) subset suitable with AOT+JIT techniques of hosting near-native-speed code such as Unreal Engine 3. https://brendaneich.com/2013/03/the-web-is-the-game-platform/ https://brendaneich.com/2013/03/the-web-is-the-game-platform... Java was mismanaged as a plugin (and only ever a plugin -- no deep or even shallow browser integration worth talking about) by Sun, who tried getting it into Windows after Microsoft was killing Netscape (Microsoft then killed Java in Windows, pulled trigger on .NET; Oracle later bought Sun). Flash had its day but fell to HTML5 and fast JS, Adobe threw in the towel well before Wasm announcement, even salted the earth re: good Flash tools instead of retargeting them at the Web. Google was a house divided all along but had absolutely no plan for getting PNaCl supported by Apple, never mind Mozilla or Microsoft. I told them so, and still get blame and delicious tears to drink as I sit on my Throne of Skulls, having caused all of this by Giant-Fivehead mind control (testimony from one of my favorite minions at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555028).