Why does everything about WebAssembly make such a big deal about it being AST based rather than a stack or register machine? Sure this is a meaningful technical difference but I don't see why it's really a "selling point".
To summarize:
1. Much smaller representation, which will mean faster download times 2. More control-flow structure retained, which means less needs to be rebuilt by JIT-compilers. 3. As a corollary of #2, we get easier and more helpful 'decompiling' of code blobs 4. Another corollary of #2: easier analysis for safety properties