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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Since I saw the "replace the entire stack" image, I expect no less than that the website should be made in Beads, hosted on a server running Beads OS, and the frontend should be WebAssembly compiled from Beads.

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Beads was going to be recoded in Web Assembly, however, the many restrictions on I/O to the user's hard drive inside the browser make it very to build a compiler inside a browser. Hopefully in the near future Web Assembly will become a fully capable virtual machine, that will unify all the different hardware and operating systems, effectively becoming a universal virtual OS.

But any day now the dam will break, and WebAssembly will get access to I/O and the full browser API (last time i checked web assembly runs on its own compute-only thread, and is not permitted direct access)

Any day now? That seems... optimistic. Are there objective reasons to think that this is true?

Web assembly is not a hypervisor and doesn't intend to be one.

many people, myself included, view Web Assembly has a future virtual machine that is universally available across hardware, ending the hassle of making specific executables for each operating system. A kind of improved P-Code system, if you are familiar with how UCSD Pascal worked (another brilliant Prof. Wirth project).

That's a very different claim than your parent post.

Portable generic VM (like the jvm but for anything), sure why not.

Having web browsers allow arbitrary access to hard disk? That's something else.

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