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by jxcl 2646 days ago
1. It's an open standard that the major browsers have agreed to, so it's not a plugin that you have to install. A WASM app will work seamlessly in your browser without any additional software.

2. WASM is designed from the ground up as a compile target, not a language. We already see many languages with support for building to WASM. C, C++, Rust, and eventually when WASM supports garbage collection we'll probably see Python, JS, Go, all with support for compiling to WASM.
3 comments
slimsag 2646 days ago
Go already can be compiled to WASM, and it is likely that the Go GC will always perform better than the WASM one for Go applications (with some minor exceptions)
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the_duke 2646 days ago
The current Go implementation is pretty slow for a number of reasons though.

GCs usually need low level system acces in a way that is not supported by WASM for obvious reasons (security, sandboxing, ...). Go also has problems with the way they implement Goroutines if I remember correctly.

WASM will definitely need some kind of GC bridge to make things efficient for garbage collected languages. Potentially with certain primitives exposed that make shipping your own GC efficient. We'll see how it develops.

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pjmlp 2646 days ago
UNCOL and TIMI reborn.
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arcticbull 2646 days ago
(1) could be resolved by shipping Java, let's say hypothetically.

(2) the JVM was designed from the ground up as a compile target also, for Java, but is also used by Kotlin, Clojure, Ruby (JRuby), Python (Jython) and Scala, among others. Even JavaScript (Rhino, Nashorn and Graal).

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Rusky 2646 days ago
The JVM was designed as a compile target for a very particular kind of language. One with a Java-like object model, with some later concessions for more dynamic languages.

C, C++, Rust, etc. do not fit into that model at all. There's a lot of software written in C, and there's a lot of performance to be gained by dropping down to that level when necessary.

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fulafel 2645 days ago
By later concessions do you mean invokedynamic? How much did it help? Clojure doesn't use it even now, 8 years after it came about, I think. Is it mostly for JRuby?

The JVM is (and was from the start) a lot more dynamic than Java.

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DonHopkins 2646 days ago
But Oracle.
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