[bb88]

Yeah, I re-watched that video tonight. We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of "The Birth and Death of Javascript".

Much of it still holds water. I think what's disappointing is how little progress we've come in the 9 years since that video has come out. WASM has been a disappointment -- at least to me.

And the problem WASM solved really would be almost better instead if we just had a ring 4 for web browsers. It seems clear that X86 has won, unless you think that RISC V still has a chance (which is dubious unless you're in the embedded space)

[jmillikin]

  > And the problem WASM solved really would be almost
  > better instead if we just had a ring 4 for web
  > browsers. It seems clear that X86 has won, unless
  > you think that RISC V still has a chance

Mobile has a large and growing lead over desktop[0] for web traffic, and every popular mobile device released for the past ~decade has run on ARM.

[0] https://techjury.net/blog/mobile-vs-desktop-usage/

[bb88]

Arm was only %8 of the CPU market in 2021.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/12/apple_arm_m1_intel_x8...

I'm still waiting for those arm desktops that run Windows...

[jmillikin]

I'm struggling to phrase a response that would be polite enough for HN, so instead I'll encourage you to re-read both my post and your link more carefully.

[nl]

More people use web browsers on mobile than on desktops: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

Therefore there are more browsers on ARM than there on x86.

> I'm still waiting for those arm desktops that run Windows

This seems irrelevant, but MS is shipping them now: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/project-volterra-rev...

[quux]

Hello from a desktop ARM machine that runs windows!

M1 Mac Mini running Windows 11 in parallels.

[remexre]

I thought we tried this with Google's NaCl and nobody liked it; the WASM problems don't seem to be particularly related to the instruction set, but rather to its lack of OS services; you'd need to reinvent those for a NaCl-like.

[kevingadd]

Yeah the NaCl model is a dead-end for web apps. It's a massive struggle to get all the vendors to align on things and trying to get them to align on a huge from-scratch redesign and reimplementation effort is way way harder. We'll see if it works out for WASI, which is basically an attempt at that but in the server application space.

[bb88]

I'm not sure that's true though. In the end all emulation is going to be JIT'd with some kind of data port to access system memory.

Whether it's NACL/VMWare/WASM/whatever the technology for emulation has been around for decades.

I guess I'm not sure why WASM is so special it needs a decade to come to fruition.

[kevingadd]

Apple has arguably proven that it is possible to transition to ARM, and considering how much of a foothold that architecture already has in mobile and game consoles, it seems unwise to declare that x86 has won.