What if the only thing you have access to is a browser, but you'd like to explore Clang, networking, etc?

This turns a lock-down old Chromebook into a box you can learn to develop on.

Interesting thought, but realistically what need is that serving besides curiosity?

Even chromebooks have real linux underneath, the scenario you're describing is so niche it's hard to imagine. IMO it makes much more sense to use free tier on a cloud provider

Not all Chromebooks do. Because their processor doesn't support it.

Think about education Chromebooks that get locked down, too.

Moving emulators and virtual machines to the Web can be handy for software preservation. The Internet Archive has a massive collection of games and applications that you can run right now, on any device with a browser, thanks to this kind of tech.

Also (speaking from 1st hand experience) some big companies issue laptops that are extremely locked down - with IT needed to install any software and only after it's been vetted. This gives a bit more liberty without crossing any of the security boundaries.

I think it's because people want to code in other languages besides javascript

a “cross-platform” assembly format could, in time, make introducing new hardware architectures a bit easier.

for example, these guys link to a discord channel to chat about their work, but i can’t join it easily because even though Discord ships a Linux client, they only ship it for x86 and not arm. further down the road, i’d like to try some RISC-V devices: that’ll be that same experience times ten. a portable assembly format has the chance to overcome this.

Isn't Discord's desktop client just an Electron wrapper around their website? It seems like there might be an easier way to get that running on other platforms.

If I wanted the full-fat Discord app (rather than a browser website or PWA, or a third-party client Discord will ban you over), I'd look into https://github.com/SpacingBat3/WebCord (which I think isn't detected and banned, but I cannot guarantee this or that they won't rewrite Discord to the point you can get banned for using it).

They also ban for blocking the /api/science/ data mining endpoint.

Do you have any cases of people getting banned over it? It would be scary, uBlock Origin blocks /api/*/science and it would be terrifying if running an adblocker could get you banned from Discord.

Where have I heard this before?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCOL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neutral_Distribut...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-code_machine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_i#TIMI

Not bothering to list all of them since 1958, WebAssembly is only the latest go at it.

hey i’m not saying it will or won’t succeed on that front — just that it’s a motivating factor.

but also, look at its neighbors. Vulkan/SPIR-V has made it standard to ship bytecode-level shaders (graphical or compute) which are device agnostic but still performant. even if we’re cursed to try this “architecture agnostic” stuff a hundred times, i don’t think we can say there hasn’t been any progress. that progress only comes from people trying, even if 9 out of 10 serious attempts are flops.

So far Vulkan/SPIR-V doesn't seem to be as successful as DirectX/DXIL or CUDA/PTX, specially in what concerns mature polyglot support.

We weren't unaware of these things. Wasm is the first low-level format to instantly have broad availability, becoming available in all web browsers in 2017. AFAICT none of the previous formats had low overhead platform-independent in-process sandboxing, and certainly none had a machine-checked proof of type system soundness.

So Wasm has a few legs up on what came before.

If we ignore PNaCL and CrossBridge.

As for how sound the type system is in the face of attacks at the Flash, ActiveX and Java applets scale, it remains to be seen, although there are already some USENIX papers slowly coming up regarding WebAssembly actual security.

It's not that we need a VM in the browser, but we just need a VM that's sandboxed in terms of security.

Other than JavaScript, what other way can you send arbitrary code to a device and expect it to run there? WASM is the only other option.

Don't buy it. A sandbox is a sandbox. Yes, javascript runs in a sandbox, but other technologies exist beyond javascript-in-a-sandbox.

This is just really inefficient: VM in WASM in javascript in a sandbox in a browser, is insane and will forever be slow due to complexity.

Fun for the lulz, but for the planet's sake I hope this doesn't get adopted.

Wasm is not implemented "in JavaScript", rather JS engines reuse important parts of their compilation pipeline to generate good code for Wasm.