[ilaksh]

He mentions Plan 9. Reading that Wikipedia lead to the Inferno operating system. Which mentions a focus on portability and a file interface. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

That reminds me of web assembly and WASI.

So this is tangential but how is the component stuff in web assembly doing? It seemed like such a great idea to me but apparently, at least at one point, was somehow controversial or political.

Also, I wonder if it would be possible to port Inferno to web assembly.

[pjmlp]

Basically WebAssembly is anything but new.

You can also check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Workstations, USCD Pascal, Modula-2 MeDos, IBM AS/400, TenDRA, Taos, Oberon, among many others, that have had the idea of bytecode as portable OS binaries.

[ori_b]

Though, wasm has a high level structure that makes it a clunky compilation target. The bytecodes above improve on wasm in that regard.

[ilaksh]

The high level structure is an advancement that is important for optimization.

[ori_b]

It isn't; the first thing production optimizers do is throw it away.

It supposedly makes verification of SSA properties marginally faster, but that's not the bottleneck.