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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

It would be so great if WASM gives us the paradise that Java promised thirty years ago. Being able to get fast, "write once, run anywhere" would be awesome.

I wonder if someone could make a decent cross-platform GUI toolkit to save us from the horribly slow Electron-hell we've carved out for ourselves.

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We could name it the Abstract Window Toolkit and it would render the same on every platform. But then, someone would get butthurt about it having a "distinct look" and decide to make the Standard Widget Toolkit that uses native bindings. Fantastic that it stops that distinct look, with the small asterisk that you now have to ship .dll/.so/.dylib shims in your "cross platform" app

I'm no wasm expert, but I find it just fantastically unlikely that they're going to beat the decades of research that have gone into the JIT in the JVM anytime soon. But, I guess if the objective is just "run this bytecode in every browser on Earth," that ship has sailed and I will look forward to more copies of node infiltrating my machines

> I'm no wasm expert, but I find it just fantastically unlikely that they're going to beat the decades of research that have gone into the JIT in the JVM anytime soon

Probably not, but that's sort of orthogonal to my point.

Java started as "write once run anywhere", but it has almost become the opposite of that: "write once, run it on your specific server".

"Portability" is not nearly the same concern with Java as it was thirty years ago; I don't have direct numbers on this, but I would guess that a vast majority of Java code written in 2025 is either running on a server or running an Android app, neither of which are nearly as "portable" what was kind of promised in the 90's, at least not on the desktop.

You say that, and yet for your cited Android apps, they are built using gradle, which is written for the JVM, or using Maven, which is written for the JVM, and likely even typed inside IntelliJ (aka Android Studio) which is written for the JVM. Also, this may be splitting hairs, but Android is actually dalvik, not the JVM

That's why I deliberately said "Java", not JVM (though I think dalvik has been deprecated and it's ART now).

I'm sure you can list any number of programs that are written in Java, but it certainly has not been the cross-platform standard that everyone was promised; it feels like Electron has more or less taken its mantle in the world of desktop land.

> "write once, run it on your specific server".

Funny, how people forget that a "specific server" can be running Linux on bare metal ARM or a x86 container, or maybe Windows or even MacOS.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that you're not typically deploying JAR files outside of an extremely controlled environment.

For a server environment, I set all the parameters I want and then I code around it. Obviously there's a lot of variation between different servers, but you typically develop your server code a specific set of servers.

And you don't have to think about your server architecture when you run unit tests on your jar locally from your M4 MacBook.

How convenient is that, huh?

> I wonder if someone could make a decent cross-platform GUI toolkit to save us from the horribly slow Electron-hell we've carved out for ourselves.

https://github.com/slint-ui/slint

Still not half as feature rich as Swing, or JavaFX, since we are talking about bytecode ecosystems.

The Orca project is attempting to do exactly that: https://github.com/orca-app/orca

> Windows 10 or later, or Mac 13 or later (Linux is not yet supported)

Aww, man, they nixed my chances of trying that out on _both_ of my local machines in one fell swoop (still on macOS 12.7 because it works fine)

Does this thing, really, seriously, need the most bleeding edge Darwin toys?! Come to think of it, I bet $1 it's because GHA only goes down to 13 <https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runne...> It seems GL is in the same boat <https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/runners/hosted_runners/macos.h...>

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