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It seems there would still be some sort of interpreter for WASM - meaning any performance gains could have been made using existing bytecode interpreters. I'm probably wrong on that assumption, but am unclear why.

I guess I'm wondering what makes WASM so much better than investing engineering energies into existing things.

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wasm compiles to "native" code, for whatever "native" means in your execution environment

if you're deploying wasm to the browser, then native means your JS engine

if you're deploying wasm to the server, then native means actual machine code

the competitive advantage versus java is (at a very high level) the language design -- java is much higher-level than wasm, which limits its potential

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