> The alternative is that we have some specification for intermediate code which is low level enough to be a universal compile target but abstract enough to be possible to compile to essentially any CPU architecture. That's what WASM is.
Isn't that exactly what Java did years ago? And what Microsoft's .NET bytecode did when they had to remove the Microsoft JVM?
Standard WASM is stack based, unlike every real computer out there. It also explicitly supports unaligned memory which is terrible for native execution performance. It was designed for the limitations of the browser sandbox as an evolution on a backwards compatible Javascript library.
I don't know why you'd need tk shop different versions for different instruction sets, that's exactly the problem Java, and to a lesser extent dotnet, solves. The runtime is platform dependent, the binary isn't. You can build a JAR and run it on anything from old MIPS server to a Windows 11 machine or an M2 Mac if your code targets a runtime old enough. You don't need to compile separate versions for each platform at all.
Building platform independent executables has already been solved by Java and very few people actually use it. I'm not against an alternative to Java, or anything else tainted by Oracle for that matter, I just don't see the use cases outside the browser for platforms precompiling WASM.