WebAssembly Stack Machine

It also great for obfuscation.

PS.

I am talking about problem of trust, which this binary format creates. Here, in Linux, we are solving problem of trust using distributions, maintainers, signed packages, signed repositories, releases. It's why I will trust binary packages from my distribution but will not trust webasm binaries.

Instead of having everything go through central trusted authorities, as Linux distros do, wasm (as the Web does in general) relies on sandboxing untrusted content on the user side.

A binary encoding does not contribute significantly to obfuscation when it can be trivially undone. WebAssembly is an open standard, and browsers supporting wasm have builtin support for converting it to text and displaying it.

Compiled code can be much harder to read than human-written code, though this is mainly because of lowering and optimization, rather than the final encoding.

I believe that switching to a stack machine is short-sighted and a big mistake:

The AST format could open up new possibilities for software, some of which are observable in Lispy languages like Scheme (I won't list them here). Instead, we're looking at locking the software world back into this 1960's model for another 50 years out of a misguided concern for optimization over power.

It's like foregoing the arch because it's more work to craft, and instead coming up with a REALLY efficient way to fit square blocks together. Congratulations, we can build better pyramids, but will never grasp the concept of a cathedral.

To really grasp my point, I BEG you all to watch the following two videos in full and think hard about what Alan Kay & Douglass Crockford have to say about new ideas, building complex structures, and leaving something better for the next generation:

https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0

As Alan Kay states, what is simpler: something that's easier to process, but for which the software written on top of it is massive; or one that takes a bit more overhead, but allows for powerful new ways to model software and reduce complexity?

I believe that an AST model is a major start in inventing "the arch" that's been missing in software, and with something that will proliferate the whole web ... how short-sighted it would be to give that up in favor of "optimizing" the old thing.

Imagine if instead of JavaScript, the language of the web had been Java? Lambdas would not be mainstream; new ways of doing OOP would not be thought of; and all the amazing libraries that have been written because of the ad-hoc object modeling that JavaScript offers. Probably one of the messiest and inefficient languages ever written, yet one of the most powerful ever given. C'mon, let's do it a step more by making it binary, homoiconic, and self-modifying.

Thanks.

It's looks like you have very limited experience with Linux distros. Nobody forces Linux users to use repositories. We use repositories because we trust them much more than random binary blobs from Internet. Binary encoding contribute significantly to obfuscation, because it cannot be formatted, or refactored, or commented, or modified (e.g. to add assertion or print debugging information). Nobody programs in binary.

WebAsm creates problem. Same problem as Java, Flash, Unity, PNaCl and dozens of other platforms to execute binary blobs from untrusted sources. And the only solution is to add trust, e.g. by publishing heavy-weight libraries for review and patching by third-party maintainers, e.g. such libraries as SDL, game engines, GUI, databases, etc. Otherwise, we will have same situation as with other libraries, e.g. JQuery, when sites are using old version of common library with known security problems for ages, despite that fixed version is freely available.