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Re:WebAssembly: A New Hope by chrshawkes on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @04:51PM (#14973460)
Down votes are unfair, this was quite funny.
Re:WebAssembly: A New Hope by btilly on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @06:29PM (#14974350)
Why would you think that it is a joke? It is true and how things have always gone!

When I got into computers it would have been ridiculous to imagine carrying around a computer running a different OS in a virtual machine, within which we were running a virtual network of small virtual machines existed to run programs written in a scripting language that itself runs in a VM!

Sounds crazy, right? And yet it isn't rare to find a developer on a Mac laptop running Linux in VirtualBox, inside of which they run Docker containers to run applications built on node.js. This is not done as a joke, it is done because it is a useful development environment for an application that is supposed to eventually be deployed to a cloud.

Portable software has been a motivating dream of our industry since forever. It was a selling point of COBOL, Pascal, HTML, Java, Flash, JQuery, and so on and so forth. The idea of deploying a known client target to get rid of browser differences is inevitable. It is just a question of who will be the first to do one that is good and fast enough to get mindshare.