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WebAssembly... Wow, if we keep going, we'll re-invent what Sun achieved 20 years ago with Java. If only they hadn't f-ed it up...

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The JVM problem was that it had applets and did not have the DOM integration of Javascript. I do often wonder if instead of Javascript in 1995 we had got WebAssembly and WebSockets.

You could actually call into JavaScript from Applets, using something called LiveConnect. See https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/in...

Was it simply/easy? No. But, you probably wouldn't want to.. The DOM is a crappy way to build an application UI. Someday we might figure that out.

If you consider custom elements, how is it different from any other way of building ui?

The concept of the DOM is so widely considered to be useful in declaring user interfaces, that multiple languages have copied it.

http://fxexperience.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Introduci...

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

The HTML DOM sucks, but what other DOM is widely available and already installed on literally every machine on the planet?

Probably the 2 minute startup time was a bigger problem for applets.

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