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.