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by PaulDavisThe1st 1146 days ago
So you feel that e.g. Epson, who could not be bothered to rebuild their existing C-ish driver against a newer version of libc, will instead port it to WASM because ... when they already have working drivers for macOS and Windows that they currently maintain ....

I'm lost.
1 comments
jmillikin 1146 days ago
If the standard for Linux scanner drivers was WASM, then companies who publish Linux drivers (such as Epson) would receive perfect forward compatibility for free.

If WASM driver support were to be included in Windows and/or macOS, similar to how macOS and Linux share CUPS, then Linux support would be more widespread because the vendor's driver could be reused as-is.

I think the thought process behind "supporting one unified platform-independent bytecode would be easier than compiling a .so that works with all GNU libc versions" is straightforward and self-evident. Do you disagree?

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PaulDavisThe1st 1146 days ago
> I think the thought process behind "supporting one unified platform-independent bytecode would be easier than compiling a .so that works with all GNU libc versions" is straightforward and self-evident. Do you disagree?

1. it doesn't really matter what I think

2. Compiling a .so that works with all glibc versions is almost certainly an order of magnitude easier than providing a unified wasm implementation that works on (at least) 3 platforms.

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