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WhereIsTheTruthyesterday at 9:03 AM1 replyview on HN

The sandboxification of WASM is what happened

Instead of building a true portable binary format with system access, we got a JavaScript VM from TEMU:

- Reference Types

- Exception Handling

- GC

Makes GC'd languages compile better, not system programming

Meanwhile, the actually needed capabilities remain blocked forever:

- Memory: Still can't mmap, still can't allocate outside linear memory

- Networking: Still needs JS interop bullshit

- Device: Still need JS interop bullshit and still sandboxed behind browser security model

The Result: WASM isn't a serious systems target, it's a compilation artifact for managed languages that could've just targeted JS directly


Replies

pjmlpyesterday at 11:00 AM

Correction, some GC languages, the GC doesn't support interior pointers for example.