Oh hey, we've reached the "Metal" stage! https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Granted, yeah, we never (or haven't yet) really transitioned to running "full legacy software" inside the browser, or at least it's not common place. That said, I've seen people compile Wine to wasm, Linux to wasm, and lots of other things to wasm, and run em in a browser. Many of the "fake" demos could be done for real now.
The one aspect that remains thoroughly farcical is an equivalent of Wine for OS X/Cocoa good enough to run a web browser. :-(
[edit] And asm.js kind of died on the vine. Not sure how to feel about that one. Wasm could he described as an evolution of the same idea, but in a lot of ways it's something entirely different.
Probably wouldn’t be too hard to boot Linux (under QEMU compiled for wasm), and then fire up a Windows 95 VM using QEMU TCG …
Could repeat this a few times - Inception style…
I think he was trying to bend reality with words. I can see many apps that are running in electron on my laptop, each consuming 300MB+ (e.g. Spotify), while many other apps are written in native Swift for example, especially with the help of AI, giving the best performance possible...
Edit.
And prices of RAM nowadays...
They are consuming 300MB of RAM because they are built on Electron and the NPM ecosystem.
This might be what you were getting to but I tend to agree with the idea of place all the interaction logic in a high kevel language and get the performance where it's needed.
Electron does not do that and neither does the people developing electron apps most of the time. I doubt many people throwing electron apps together chose to do that so they can put their CPU intensive code in C/C++/Rust/swift, they want to erite everything in JS.
What should happen is the bare minimum needs to be in JS and the rest in an efficient compiled language.
I mean even the browser does that, the DOM API hands off to lower level libraries for multimedia etc.
Seeing that Metal replaces kernel/userspace boundaries with VM protections for memory, meaning that system call overhead is eliminated, at the price of ASM/VM overhead.
What a fascinating idea. Kidding on the square...