[DonHopkins]

>"WebAssembly has been designed to scale from tiny devices to large server farms or CDNs..."

What's ironic is that the "tiny devices" and even "high end professional desktop workstation and server devices" that Java was originally designed to run on when it was started in 1990 were MUCH tinier than the devices considered "tiny" today.

How many more times faster is a typical smartphone today (Raspberry Pi 3: 2,451 MIPS, ARM Cortex A73: 71,120 MIPS) that a 1990 SparcStation 2 pizzabox (28.5 MIPS, $15,000-$27,000)?

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Instructions_per_second

[steve19]

Forget full computers, an official Java subset even runs on every GSM SIM card. It is incredible!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Card

[IshKebab]

People keep bringing this up but Java Card is a really small subset of Java so you can't draw any conclusions. In particular it has no garbage collection, which is easily the heaviest part of Java.

> Many Java language features are not supported by Java Card (in particular types char, double, float and long; the transient qualifier; enums; arrays of more than one dimension; finalization; object cloning; threads). Further, some common features of Java are not provided at runtime by many actual smart cards (in particular type int, which is the default type of a Java expression; and garbage collection of objects).

[ktta]

To add on, here's a quick intro to the headache that goes into writing Java for GSM cards - https://youtu.be/31D94QOo2gY?t=607

[tluyben2]

But writing Javacard for ICCs is like writing another language and ecosystem entirely. The syntax is familiar but there the comparison kind of ends.