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xyzzy_plughtoday at 2:58 PM3 repliesview on HN

I still maintain the notion we're in the wrong timeline, one where PNaCl died and instead of a worthy, timely successor we end up being boiled alive in a soup of Electron apps.

I really thought, for a time, that we'd be doing everything in the browser. And in a way that's increasingly true, but it all just feels worse than ever. I like WASM and I want to like WASM but the rate of maturity within the ecosystem is incredibly abysmal.

What's worse is that we should all be running our untrustworthy AI tools and their outputs in precisely such a sandbox, and companies are selling the reverse: hosted sandboxes, hosted JS-based VMs.

I guess that was always the problem: there was never any money in a client-side sandbox.


Replies

hoppptoday at 4:27 PM

Its like natural selection, maybe not the best traits win overall but one that is the most popular choice because everyone is a webdev.

alex7otoday at 3:56 PM

I do understand why NaCL and PNaCL are undesirable and why wasm is much better, but as a student the NaCL ssh app had saved my computer science homeworks more than once, and this is something that still doesn't have an alternative although I rarely would need it nowadays.

tardedmemetoday at 3:12 PM

What are the key differences between PNaCl and WASM?

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