Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

Comment by badsectoracula | Hacker News Reader

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> I noticed that there seem to be more "elsewhere" than "browser" applications of the technology. But we already have e.g. the Mono engine with a proven, standardized IL which already offers most of the WASM features planned for the "elsewhere" use case.

Well, yeah, that is the thing. The idea and similar tech existed ever since P-Code for Pascal (and perhaps earlier) and of course the very popular - at the time at least - Java and its JVM, all of which predate Mono and IL and already had several open source implementations.

However just the tech isn't enough - in fact, if anything, the computing history shows that tech is rarely the winning factor in what gets accepted and becomes popular, it is largely social and political factors. In this case the "social" factor seems to be that this isn't just "more 'elsewhere' than 'browser' applications" but actually "'elsewhere' and 'browser' applications". The fact that browsers support WebAssembly natively (as opposed through some plugin like it was done for JVM/IL/Flash/etc - ie. similar tech) is a big social and political boost that it has. This is where the hype currently comes from.

Pretty much agreed, it comes down to a discussion I had why before C was the only real standard for language interoperability, and nothing else could ever be since there's no pressure for the language implementers to adopt anything else, because everyone else is using plain C as the only officially supported glue as well.

(OS vendors can have their own little things but it doesn't matter because it will never be adopted outside the OS and will only ever be used to talk to the OS).

This changes with WASM because if languages want to run in the browser, they need to target WASM, and suddenly there's a new standard that can put as much pressure in the language implementations as the C standard. This is the second time this has happened in history and I'm quite hopeful WASM and WASI catch on since C is complete jank as a glue language (even if it's used by everyone).

It all comes down to popularity and politics.

> Java and its JVM

WASM shares more ideas with CIL than the JVM, especially when we have a look at the WASM proposals in progress. CIL and Pascal P-Code in contrast to JVM support e.g. value objects which supports applications with less dynamic memory management; JVM requires a dynamic allocation for each fly speck and thus powerful compacting collectors to cope with it. In WASM the memory management strategy is up to the application.

> The fact that browsers support WebAssembly natively

I was referring to the "elsewhere" case, where WASM seems to flourish, not the browser. And the social factor is definitely important, but I'm more interested what WASM is supposed to deliver we don't already have on a technical level.

> WASM shares more ideas with CIL than the JVM [..] In WASM the memory management strategy is up to the application.

That level of difference doesn't matter. The point is that WASM is a portable and sandboxed target (like JVM) which is (or will be) faster, more secure (e.g. capability based security in WASI) and with more language support (strictly more when optional GC becomes a thing) and other differences are implementation details.

"Everything Old is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly"

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentat...

"WebAssembly Troubles"

http://troubles.md/wasm-is-not-a-stack-machine/

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