[dwaite]

You cannot download and execute arbitrary files, so had to have something interpreted.

They could pick something easier to emulate perhaps, but x86 has benefits from a compatibility standpoint.

Maybe one day there would be a benefit of targetting WASM with a natively implemented syscall api?

[saagarjha]

We looked into it; the problem is that this makes system calls unbearably slow because they require IPC.