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Comment by kowdermeister | Hacker News Reader

> Why do we - developers fall into this trap?

Regardless of is this a trap or not, it's obvious to me that developers want simplicity and consistency. WA provides both so don't wonder why it's taking off.

> So instead of Linux/Windows/OSX we will have Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Whatever all with their own implementation gotchas

I let the compilers worry about this :)

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Yes, declaring the hard parts to be someone else's problem always works out in the end, doesn't it?

Hopefully in 20 years, when people are talking about MetaWebAssembly to abstract away the platforms that run on WASM, you'll have a different perspective on what you've said here.

Oh come on. If you are doing any kind of development, you too, are relying on abstractions and someone elses machinery. That doesn't make you lazy or amoral or something.

Yes, but I'm not under the delusion that adding more abstractions will solve the problem. And actually, I really wish there were fewer abstractions because they often just get in the way.

Adding more abstractions solve existing problems while creating new ones.

But then, this is what humans have been doing since we figured out stone flints.

Yeah, right. Compilers do not deal with the difference in presence / absence and different implementations of various features on different platforms, be it native OS or Browser OS.

Is that so? Worst case I can imagine is to have the same compiler emit app-firefox.wasm and app-chrome.wasm binaries from the same codebase, but I think this is highly unlikely.

But there probably always will be a safe flag that generates everywhere running binaries.

And by then you will have discovered that your software can not do this and that after being relegated to a lowest common denominator state.

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