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Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

I can't shake the niggling idea that this, just like node before it, is more or less a way for JS web devs to not have to leave the ecosystem they're comfortable with and learn a new language. We already have hundreds of ways to write native UI applications, but web devs can't bother to use them.

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When you put WASM into something that isn't a browser then it still won't be a browser afterwards. WASM is not DOM+CSS.

On top of that, JS devs would be the ones who get the short end of the stick, because js is the one language that does not compile to WASM because where WASM comes from, you already have a JS environment, no need to build a second one inside WASM.

Couldn't a native developer also take advantage of wasm/wasi to build their native application to a single build target/binary, which could then be run on Any machine?

Cross platform is in no way new. There are already plenty of ways for native devs to target multiple platforms at once if that's required.

But are any of those ways both at the assembly level (speed) and decoupled from the runtime (space)?

My takeaway from WASI is that it would allow for a single universal runtime with near-native execution. The near-native aspect being what other universal runtimes like the JVM and CLR lack due to their bundling of a GC and other non-essential features.

All the ways we have to write native UI applications aren't exactly great though, and most aren't cross platform.

Node always struck me as a strange trend but using web tech for UIs seems like a good fit for a lot of cases

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