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.
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.
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.
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.
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)