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martin_ky | 7 years ago

> Qt on WebAssembly is analogous to the plugins of yore like Flash and Java applets. WebAssembly is kind of like a new plugin container for native code.

No it’s not. With WebAssembly, it is a matter of trust in your browser vendor and its ability to properly sandbox WASM/JS content. With plugins, you basically gave up full control of your machine also to whichever plugin vendor. The number of trusted relationships is different - it’s fewer with builtin WebAssembly. That is a noteworthy distinction, I think.

discuss

TimTheTinker|7 years ago

That's true... but my point was that WebAssembly (including asm.js) now provides what Flash and Java provided previously -- a portal to run non-JS code at near-native speeds.

martin_ky|7 years ago

Right. There's nothing revolutionary here, that's for sure.

I think, it could have been Java (or the JVM at least) in place of WebAssembly in browsers already a long time ago, were it a more open standard.