But i am not talking about such a use, i am talking about using WASM to create applications that are designed to be part of a web site and meant to be accessible only online - pretty much what the majority of Flash games did previously. The original message i replied to was about web-based applications that are meant to be delivered online so my messages were with the assumption that we are talking about web-based applications pretty much in the same vein as Google Docs or games like the thousands of Flash games you'd see out there some years ago. You wrote "That assumes it would be impossible to download a WASM blob and run it natively" - the possibility to do that would be exactly the same as downloading a JS file and run it natively (in this case i take "natively" to mean running an offline local copy in a browser without any sort of external requirement, like downloading files off the web). I do not see a reason for expecting WASM to be used in any different way.
Re:Clang runs in the browser and compiles C++ to WebAssembly
by badsectoracula on Wednesday January 03, 2018 @01:17AM
(#16058918)
I think we are talking about different things, you seem to be talking about the possibility of using WASM as a generic virtual machine in the same vein as JVM - in that case, if there is some sort of runtime that would provide the ability for a program to be made to work both in web mode and offline mode and the developer decides to make their application available through it, then yes it wont be an issue. After all people already do that with JVM, Flash and even ActiveX (which was originally meant for offline use).
WebAssembly is open and it's intended to be a general purpose compilation target, the technologies you listed are proprietary or only intended for a single language. Also, WebAssembly's own docs state non-web embeddings as an explicit design goal[0].
As there is no commercial need for a particular corporation to prevent it, and there is no design limitation preventing it, there's no reason to assume some sort of native WASM runtime won't be available in the future. That would make it no different than Python or Ruby or any of the multitude of C++ runtimes I have to download with games on Steam.
My point being that there's no reason to assume WASM has to run as remote code connected to a server over which the user has no control or meaningful access, as opposed to a binary you can run on your desktop. There's nothing in the WASM spec that forces such a distinction to exist, that's an architectural decision made at the application level, and one that could be made in any language.
[0]http://webassembly.org/docs/non-web/