| What "good" languages does WASM enable? All those other dynamic scripting languages? They're DOA because nobody's going to download the entire VM every time. What about all those nice functional languages? Very problematic because the toolchain relies on LLVM-like semantics which don't like good garbage collectors or functional programming in general. We then get down to C-like languages, Rust, and more esoteric languages (and promptly discard the esoteric ones for lack of a decent ecosystem). Who in their right mind wants to write a front-end in C++ or Rust? By the time you get anything done, the web has changed and you're stuck with a pile of dated code that takes too much time and costs too much money to update. The web had a shot at a decent language with Dart (it was/is even an ECMA standard). It didn't die because of other browsers. It died because of poor web dev adoption rates. If only Eich had been allowed to implement scheme then none of this would have been an issue. |
Hosted on a CDN in compact form, it'll be feasible; application can just link against it, it does not have to be recompiled on the user's machine.
> Very problematic because the toolchain relies on LLVM-like semantics which don't like good garbage collectors or functional programming in general.
That will indeed be a problem. The design restrictions imposed by the environment (continuous heap, emulated concurrency) will bite us in the ass hard. Instead of layering a lot of very leaky, performance killing "security" features over other half assed features, a better way would be to step back and use a tiny hypervisor. That way you have hardware accelerated memory safety, but it would require the application to be able to run in a microkernel; recent IncludeOS + ukvm has a boot time of 11 ms. (Great, now I want to write a plugin that embeds qemu in Chromium and uses a virtual device to communicate with the host.)