[milansuk]

Nice project! I love WASM. It's designed to be sandboxed and portable from day one. I wish WASM was invented instead of Javascript in the 90s. WASM will eat the world.

What I hope most is endurance. There are many programs that we are not able to run anymore. The best examples are probably older games. I hope WASM will change that, although I'm a little bit nervous about adding new features, because simple specs have a higher chance of surviving, but the future of binaries looks exciting.

[cmrdporcupine]

Believe it or not, back in the 90s we thought (on the whole) that web browsers were for browsing hypertext documents. Not for replacing the operating system. There's a reason JS started out limited to basic scripting functionality for wiring up e.g. on-click handlers and form validation. That it grew into something else is not indicative of any design fault in JS (tho it has plenty), but with the use it was shoehorned into. The browser as delivery mechanism for the types of things you're talking about is... not what Tim Berners Lee or even Marc Andreesen had in mind?

Back then "the network is the computer" people ended up shipping thin X clients: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Computer in order to do richer applications.

I have very mixed feelings about WASM. There is a large... hype-and-novelty screen held up in front of it right now.

There are many Bad Things about treating the web browser as nothing more than a viewport for whatever UI designer and SWE language-of-the-wek fantasy is going around. Especially when we get into things like accessibility, screen readers, etc.

As for the people treating WASM as the universal VM system outside the browser... Yeah, been down that road 30 years ago, that's what the JVM was supposed to be? But I understand that's not "cool" now, so...

Sigh.

[milansuk]

> Believe it or not ...

I believe and agree with most of you wrote ;)

The main problem with HTML/CSS/JS is programmers want more than these languages offer. With WASM you can pick up language(must compile to .wasm) that fits your use case best. This is the freedom most programmers want.

There will always be programmers who will draw their custom buttons(instead of modifying DOM from WASM) and ignore accessibility. They can do this with JS as well, but most of them don't.

[ebiester]

I keep hoping others see this as well. Sun was so close to the right thing, but the problem is too hard to monetize and it's too vulnerable to embrace, extend, and extinguish.

[paulddraper]

> Especially when we get into things like accessibility, screen readers, etc.

> the JVM was supposed to be? But I understand that's not "cool" now

Both of these criticisms in the same post?

[galangalalgol]

I naively hope the web bifurcates into sandboxed wasm apps and document content that doesn't even need js, much less wasm. I'm not sure what a middle ground would look like or why I'd want it. But the realist in me knows wasm will eat the document content too, meaning adblockers and reader view are doomed...

[josephg]

> meaning adblockers and reader view are doomed

Maybe. As inconvenient as accessibility is, with any luck the need to make web content legible to screen readers will also keep adblockers working. Even with wasm, I don’t think the DOM is going anywhere any time soon. I haven’t seen any proposal to replace it.

[k__]

I think, JavaScript (or something similar) was required for this to work. Otherwise the ecosystem would have been infected by something like Java.

[paulddraper]

> Otherwise the ecosystem would have been infected by something like Java

As opposed to the basket of kittens known as JavaScript?