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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.

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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.

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