[Epskampie]

But if it were to run on every platform and processor the binary would have to be written to some VM, which would slow it down a bit. That’s webassembly, which is coming up.

Also, there would have to be some GUI framework that works well across all devices, phone to desktop. That alone would be massive undertaking.

I agree there is no technical reason, but once you consider all limitations and let some time pass in the end you might up with something similar to what we have now. For example you might standardize on a current graphics API, but in a few years: guess what, you have an outdated API like webGL now.

[skohan]

> But if it were to run on every platform and processor the binary would have to be written to some VM

Not necessarily. You could have different binaries for different architectures. All you need is a consistent system interface with a well-specified ABI, and the client would just have to request the binary for their architecture.

> That’s webassembly, which is coming up.

Web assembly still has the limitations of running inside the browser. It's still single-threaded, and also the file size is pretty large compared to a binary.

> Also, there would have to be some GUI framework that works well across all devices, phone to desktop.

If you had a consistent system interface, you'd only have to do it once.

> For example you might standardize on a current graphics API

I mean Vulkan is basically this. And graphics API's are converging not diverging: modern graphics API's are all structured in a very similar way, since they're all just wrappers around the low level functionality of the GPU at this point.

I'm not saying it would be easy, but the reasons we don't have it have more to do with the fact that it would be difficult to get buy-in from OS vendors than it has to do with the technical problems involved. From a technical perspective, we could easily do way better than modern web.