[wvenable]

As others have pointed out, platform independent IL is nothing new. There's nothing exciting about WebAssembly outside of the web that hasn't already been done with Java (or countless other technologies).

The true advantage of WebAssembly is that it's so sandboxed that it literally can't do anything on it's own. It can only do something when hosted in a browser where it can use JavaScript to interact with outside world.

[imtringued]

>There's nothing exciting about WebAssembly outside of the web that hasn't already been done with Java (or countless other technologies).

This is completely wrong. The JVM works at an extremely high level. Everything is a garbage collected JVM object. You will never see raw memory at the bytecode layer.

WebAssembly gives you access to the heap and stack at byte granularity. You have to bring your own memory allocator or garbage collector. It's in the damn name: "WebAssembly"

The closest equivalent is NaCL but Google didn't really put a lot of effort into pushing it for wide adoption. If I recall correctly it is also based on LLVM IR and LLVM IR isn't known for maintaining backwards compatibility which turns it into a dead end. Of course if LLVM IR was stable then WebAssembly would be redundant.

We're not living in that world. We're living in a world were WebAssembly is winning not only because of popularity but also because of strong technical fundamentals.

Honestly it seems like HN is blind to fundamentals and everything new is just some hyped up useless piece of shit.

In JS land new = always good. On HN new = always bad. There is no middle ground. Both sides are equally bad.

[wvenable]

> This is completely wrong. The JVM works at an extremely high level.

I'll give you that; it was just one example. There have been plenty of others in history, Pascal P-code is closer to WebAssembly and that's from the 70's! The concept of a portable assembly language is neither new or interesting. WebAssembly is just another compiler target -- if you can compile to it, you can compile to every other native CPU directly. That's just not that interesting as an intermediate form. Java was slightly more interesting as they abstracted the entire platform not just the CPU.

I stand by my statement that WebAssembly is only valuable because it's sandboxed in the browser.

> Honestly it seems like HN is blind to fundamentals and everything new is just some hyped up useless piece of shit.

Maybe being blind to the fundamentals is not knowing the 50 years of technology that has already been done. Remixing old technology in new ways is valuable and in this case remixing portable assembly with the browser sandbox is the cool part.