[austincheney]

> One thing that continues to amaze me is that WebAssembly isn't being discussed more outside of the context of the web.

Probably because WASM is a runtime blackbox locked inside a web page running in a browser. There is a huge amount of overhead to that and the ability to interact with anything external to the blackbox is severely limited.

I get that you are excited that WASM is a compile target for many languages, but it comes with a heavy dose of isolation and performance costs.

[icebraining]

Why is there a huge overhead to that? And how much is "huge"?

[austincheney]

Because a web browser is essentially an operating system running many internal applications. Simply open an empty browser with a single tab and watch how much memory it consumes. Compare that with a new command shell.

[icebraining]

I think harpocrates was talking about running webassembly programs without the browser.