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Comment by JonMR | Hacker News Reader

I was there live! Good times. A friend convinced me to dip out of another session to go watch Gary's talk. I feel lucky.

I've seen Gary give a few talks. All fantastic.

The Birth & Death of JavaScript is my second favorite. The fact that he stayed in character as someone from 2035 for the entire talk and used a slightly evolved English.. brilliant. I saw that at Strangeloop and have fonder memories than the PyCon rendition on his site.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

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Yeah, I re-watched that video tonight. We're coming up on the 10th anniversary of "The Birth and Death of Javascript".

Much of it still holds water. I think what's disappointing is how little progress we've come in the 9 years since that video has come out. WASM has been a disappointment -- at least to me.

And the problem WASM solved really would be almost better instead if we just had a ring 4 for web browsers. It seems clear that X86 has won, unless you think that RISC V still has a chance (which is dubious unless you're in the embedded space)

  > And the problem WASM solved really would be almost
  > better instead if we just had a ring 4 for web
  > browsers. It seems clear that X86 has won, unless
  > you think that RISC V still has a chance

Mobile has a large and growing lead over desktop[0] for web traffic, and every popular mobile device released for the past ~decade has run on ARM.

[0] https://techjury.net/blog/mobile-vs-desktop-usage/

Arm was only %8 of the CPU market in 2021.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/12/apple_arm_m1_intel_x8...

I'm still waiting for those arm desktops that run Windows...

I'm struggling to phrase a response that would be polite enough for HN, so instead I'll encourage you to re-read both my post and your link more carefully.

More people use web browsers on mobile than on desktops: https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

Therefore there are more browsers on ARM than there on x86.

> I'm still waiting for those arm desktops that run Windows

This seems irrelevant, but MS is shipping them now: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/11/project-volterra-rev...

Hello from a desktop ARM machine that runs windows!

M1 Mac Mini running Windows 11 in parallels.

I thought we tried this with Google's NaCl and nobody liked it; the WASM problems don't seem to be particularly related to the instruction set, but rather to its lack of OS services; you'd need to reinvent those for a NaCl-like.

Yeah the NaCl model is a dead-end for web apps. It's a massive struggle to get all the vendors to align on things and trying to get them to align on a huge from-scratch redesign and reimplementation effort is way way harder. We'll see if it works out for WASI, which is basically an attempt at that but in the server application space.

I'm not sure that's true though. In the end all emulation is going to be JIT'd with some kind of data port to access system memory.

Whether it's NACL/VMWare/WASM/whatever the technology for emulation has been around for decades.

I guess I'm not sure why WASM is so special it needs a decade to come to fruition.

Apple has arguably proven that it is possible to transition to ARM, and considering how much of a foothold that architecture already has in mobile and game consoles, it seems unwise to declare that x86 has won.

This guy does such great videos. The 2035 thing was so creative. And Wat is legendary in Javascript circles.

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