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Comment by The_rationalist | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: GraalVM is what should have been webassembly.

Reasons: * True polyglotism * existing, feature complete implementation * compatibility with the existing JVM platform, and through polyglotism compatibility with almost any platform/library.

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GraalVM doesn't solve the same problems as WebAssembly- it has no stable, portable format for those polyglot program definitions.

GraalVM is certainly something you could use as part of a WebAssembly implementation, though.

how is Graal more polyglot than wasm?! Does it support low level languages as well? Besides, it's only one implementation (controlled by Oracle) and will probably remain so forever — who would want to risk a lawsuit by reimplementing it, I wonder.

wasm is already in all major browsers. It's succeeding where no JVM-based approach ever could.

GraalVM does support low level languages, and that's one of the most impressive things about it. For example, TruffleRuby runs both Ruby and its associated C extensions on it, bringing major performance improvements due to sharing an optimizer.

Graal is licensed under the GPLv2. It's free software!

GPLv2 isn't free enough to be used in a commercial browser.

Nitpick: I assume you meant "GPLv2 isn't free enough to be used in a proprietary browser".

Which is why BSD has been such a commercial success and now rules the UNIX clones.

Is there any patent grant to go with it?

WebAssembly exists because there was an incremental path from JS to asm.js to wasm. Better solution are irrelevant unless there's a similar kind of path to them.

a single existing implementation is a problem, not a feature for the web platform

You can always rewrite a clone if throwing money is your finality.

Sounds like much more work than implementing a wasm vm+runtime. Besides, isn’t it owned by a company who is notoriously litigious against reimplementations?

GraalVM has started getting wasm support, so there is still a path forward.

WASM support as in "you can run stuff you can run in GraalVM on WASM" or as in "you can run WASM on GraalVM"? I assume the latter, which is, frankly, relatively unimpressive. It would have been pretty amazing to be able to run everything available in Graal in the browser - but yep, Graal is not a standard, and I'm not sure it could ever be put into one (because of the insane complexity and implementation effort I suspect in there). Would still have been cool, though, one can dream.

WASM will still end up being a pretty universal platform however, with it being everyone's compilation target. A lot like Java, but maybe without some of the mistakes.

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