An Abridged Cartoon Introduction To WebAssembly

There's the Alan Kay attitude that we can build entire systems on top of minimal VM's, rather than sacrificing power to bake in more facilities. But even he says that too much time has been wasted by teams reinventing the wheel (or flat tire) who didn't really have the chops to do it.

The other side of that, then, is the great potential for interop that Javascript offers. We now have a worldwide platform with a built-in presentation layer and a highly-optimized interpreter with useful, reflectable data structures out of the box. (edit i.e. it's a viable platform for metaprogramming... the endgame of which is JS-in-JS (see "prepack")).

I would love to see a future in which the browser (and "personal" computer generally) remained a locus of significant computation. In practice, I suspect that highly-intensive tasks (mostly AI stuff) will continue to be done on servers, not because we lack the processing power, but because end users will have signed away the custody of all data worth processing. If that is the case, then WASM's role will be to fill a fairly marginal gap, between what JS can do, and what has to be farmed out anyway.

So ultimately I hope that WASM offers a lifeline to the computing power that individuals still have. But given the state of JS (after huge investments), it feels like starting over again.

Regardless of arguments for and against whether this is a good idea, market pressure to open floodgates to other languages will be far too high to ignore.

My prediction is that WASM will quickly evolve into a new way to containerize applications, very close to a full-fledged VM/OS. The market constantly demands more features and faster execution. The only logical conclusion is that the web browser will become an operating system.

I find a lot of value in using JavaScript as a cross-platform shell. I personally do a lot of work on all of the major operating systems. I primarily (a light primary, like maybe 67%, not 90%) work on Windows, but most of my users are working on macOS. And we're all writing software that eventually has to run on Android. There is almost never a problem I can't solve using a JS project of some kind. That's the rewarding part. I feel like my software goes a lot further on the JS platform than it could have ever gone on any other.

But it's frustratingly slow. A lot of that is the poor quality of a lot of the libraries that are available. I'm not really keen on writing my own HTML templating system, but I'm afraid I might have to just to get the performance targets I want (I static-gen almost everything).

And I often feel like the language is not doing enough to help me. I love writing metaprogrammable systems, but the lack of easily accessible, standardized, advanced type information in JS is a big impediment to that. Sure, I can enumerate all of the methods an object has available to it, but there is no good way to enumerate the parameters those methods take, their return type, or even that they are methods, if I ever happen to get a reference to one of them sans the object from which it came

And yes, I still do object oriented programming. But the functional story in JavaScript is not any better. With map, filter, and reduce being methods on Array, coupled with JS's goofy OO semantics where methods can become detached from their objects if they aren't explicitly bound to them, things become frustratingly verbose to get basic functional patterns to feel good.

So a WASM that let me build better dev tools, in better languages, without losing that cross-platform capability, would be a godsend. Having it run in the browser also is just icing on the cake at this point.