alt Hacker NewsWith Google now pushing developer certification, Android and iOS practically being mandatory for certain basic functions like accessing your bank or certain government services, Webassembly would make web apps first class citizens that aren't subject to mobile operating system lockdown.
Being able to complete on efficiency with native apps is an incredible example of purposeful vision driving a significant standard, exactly the kind of thing I want for the future of the web and an example of why we need more stewards like Mozilla.
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How does WASM solve the platform lockdown problem? That WASM will run in a third-party app that is subject to those restrictions. The system interface exposed within that runtime is still going to be limited in the same way a native app can't get real access to the filesystem, etc.
Removing JS glue doesn't enable anything you couldn't do before. Those banks and governments still need to write the web apps, and they need to uncheck the security box which requires a hardware-attested environment.
Except that the Web is basically ChromeOS Platform nowadays, thanks to all those folks targeting only Chrome, complaining about Safari, and shipping Elecron crap.
FWIW my home computer emulators [1] already run at about the same performance (give or take 5..10% depending on CPU type) in WASM versus their natively compiled counterparts.
Performance is already as good as it gets for "raw" WASM, the proposed component model integration will only help when trying to use the DOM API from WASM. But I think there must be less complex solutions to accelerate this specific use case.
[1] https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/