Haha! WebAssembly is a really simple spec. I’d say optimized for speed and low level simplicity. You could put the entire byte code spec on a single piece of A4 and you wouldn’t have to squint.

It literally is a fancy turning machine bytecode that anyone can write an interpreter/transformer to actual cpu bytecode if needed.

As more languages support WASM, I bet we’ll see more of the front ends written in other languages.

WASM is to the web what JVMBC (java bytecode) is to apps. The open java spec flourished a big ecosystem like Adobe coldfusion/railo, jython for python, Nashhorn/rhino for JS, Jruby for Ruby, Jphp for php, cscjvm for C# and a host of others.

In my university, my compilers course assignment was to write a subset of C compiler that would output java bytecode. It really made me love compilers and programming languages.

I predict a bright future for WASM

There are other bytecode formats even simpler, UCSD Pascal P-Code for example.

The only big difference is that, like many other "modern" ideas, mainstream computers are catching up with mainframes.