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People have made that same argument about Java applets 25 years ago and we all know how that panned out. I see your point and I see and love the advantages of
by weinzierl 2y ago
People have made that same argument about Java applets 25 years ago and we all know how that panned out.
I see your point and I see and love the advantages of WASM but I doubt they will be enough to outweigh the burden to support two ecosystems in the long run. Support in the browser, as well as on the development side.
"That is exactly the success that wasm aimed for from the start."
If this is true WASM has been doomed from the start. If WASM doesn't set out to eat JavaScript's cake it will be left with the crumbs and slowly but surely starve to death.
- azakai 2y agoThe difference with Java applets from back then is that wasm was designed by web browsers in order to work well in them. Java applets were plugins, which led to security issues, and worse, security issues not under the control of the browser. Wasm is a proper part of the browser. Java applets had limited interop with JavaScript and HTML. Wasm is also somewhat limited there, but it was designed to at least have fast calls to JavaScript itself. Java also has language-specific issues. Most native code that people want to run on the web is not written in Java or another JVM language. Wasm was designed to support compilation from C++, Rust, etc. (and it has recently added Java support too).