[ZenPsycho]

you're reminding me of this 30 minute talk from 2014 "the birth and death of javascript", in which he supposes a future where CPUs basically run webassembly directly https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

[icebraining]

Reminds me of Jazelle[1], which allowed some ARM CPUs to run Java bytecode directly. AFAIK it never really caught on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

[baobrien]

It also probably didn't help that Jazelle was locked behind an NDA.

[ZenPsycho]

not exactly, the idea is to have a normal cpu like arm or x86 but the kernel doesn't ever deal with native binaries, only web assembly, and the performance penalty of running stuff in a VM gets offset by disabling memory protection and its performance penalty, since memory protection is already guaranteed by the VM.