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Comment by asdkhadsj | Hacker News Reader

I'm so often confused by these comments.

Are you saying that we could stick a JVM in the browser and ship Java applets around to be progressively/streaming loaded and executed in browser?

I don't know much about the JVM but it seems the goal of WASM and the JVM were quite different, no? And yes, WASI has overlap with JVM, but if WASM catches on and people like it, how does WASI make any less sense?

Are you advocating we have WASM and JVM but no WASI? Is that better? Not sure why anyone is crying here..

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> Are you saying that we could stick a JVM in the browser

More or less. I mean, that used to be a thing you know.

> the goal of WASM and the JVM were quite different

WASM: A universal write-once, run anywhere bytecode for heterogeneous networks of systems

JVM: A universal write-once, run anywhere bytecode for heterogeneous networks of systems

> More or less. I mean, that used to be a thing you know.

I did not know Java applets can be stream loaded (ie, optimized for the web).

> WASM: A universal write-once, run anywhere bytecode for heterogeneous networks of systems

Not at all.. at least, not in my view. WASM is optimized for platform issues specific to the web. That is to say, how it behaves on load is the first priority.

I never got that impression from the JVM. If you say it is, then it seems to be a failure in marketing of the JVM or something.

Since you seem to feel WASM is a waste, what are your thoughts on the failure of the JVM? Ie, why don't I have Go and Rust compile targets for the JVM, with JVM browser code running my JVM targets and etc?

If JVM truly does have all of these WASM-web oriented features then it is an impressive failure on JVMs part. Quite curious

> ...why don't I have Go and Rust compile targets for the JVM, with JVM browser code running my JVM targets and etc?

The JVM is not a true VM. It's heavily coupled to the Java object model and the Java GC.

And yet so many posts here cry of history repeating itself and seem to imply we should just be using the JVM.

I'm honestly puzzled. Am I the one missing something? Why is the JVM crowd seemingly upset here?

> Why is the JVM crowd seemingly upset here?

Nobody is upset, really. Java web client lost a very long time ago to Flash.

But imagine, if 25 years ago you poured your heart and soul years ago into a project because it promised to be a particular kind of great (but later failed), it can sort of drive the knife deeper and throw extra salt in the wound when your project's ugly red-headed stepchild (i.e. JavaScript) grows up into something great and gives birth years later to a beautiful standard (asm.js, later WebAssembly) that becomes what your project thought it would be, and much more. Or something like that.

Java certainly has a well-established place in software, no doubt about that. But its original promises had it (combined with AWT/Swing, applets, and XML, ... umm yeah) becoming the ultimate "write once run everywhere" platform that could scale up to massive servers and down to tiny embedded chips, and every client platform in between. In retrospect, C# and .NET would have done well not to attempt to emulate Java's initial scope.

I'm not anti-WASM. Actually, I think it's pretty cool.

And I have no particular JVM love. I use it exceedingly rarely.

It's just that you're being kind of a frustrated, pedantic tool right now.

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