It was definitely invented to make everyone happy after the NaCL/PNaCL vs asm.js political wars.

We already have lots of bytecode formats.

Think of it like German names, where people are often named for where they came from. Berliner, Münchner, etc. WebAssembly is so named because it came from the web :)

> A common misconception is that WebAssembly can only run in web browsers. Although "Web" is part of its name, WebAssembly is not limited to browsers. It's designed to be a platform-independent technology that can run in various environments, including IoT devices, edge computing, artificial intelligence, game development, backend services, or cloud services. Its portable binary format allows it to execute efficiently across different platforms and architectures.

I am not going to lie, I thought the same because of the name, too.

yeah the W assembly has nothing to do with web.

There's documentation from the people who created it stating as such, and it's weird how intransigent so many people here are about that fact.

Yes, the "w" does stand for "web" and yes it was designed with the web in mind but no it was not designed exclusively or even primarily for the web and no it isn't DOA because DOM access from a browser isn't here yet, as demonstrated by all of the existing applications already using it.

> The purpose it was invented for was not the web

> Its main goal is to enable high performance applications on the Web

So it's not just the name