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azakai

There were definitely major problems with Flash and Java. WebAssembly has learned from those, though:

* WebAssembly is an open standard, unlike Flash

* WebAssembly has multiple compatible open source implementations, unlike Flash (and Java, back in the day)

* WebAssembly is optimized for very fast startup, unlike Java

* WebAssembly is designed to integrate with JavaScript and the web in a proper way, unlike Flash and Java

* WebAssembly is designed to have the same security model as JavaScript and in fact to reuse existing hardened code as much as possible, minimizing the security risk.

Not that WebAssembly is perfect, nothing is, but it's aimed to fix the huge issues that previous related technologies had.

And the use cases are very important: things like games, photo editing, etc., all can benefit from high-speed execution of code on the web. WebAssembly is a response to developer requests.

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It certainly isn't integration with JavaScript that held Java back, as Java and JavaScript are about equally old. If I have to believe Wikipedia, both are from May 23, 1995, but I don't trust that date for JavaScript, as Wikipedia also says JavaScript was designed in two weeks in May 1995. Internet time is fast, but not that fast.

JavaScript seems to have shipped as LiveScript in September 1995, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript#Version_history also has March 1996 as date for the first version. Java seems to have been shown to the world in beta form in May 1995, with the first JDK available on January 23, 1996 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_version_history), so Java seems a tad older than JavaScript.

I think a few important 'features of WebAssembly', compared to Java are that WebAssembly is going to come out at a time when:

* machines are cheap and fast enough.

* bandwidth is cheap and plenty enough.

* the world knows you need open standards to conquer the world (or, cynically, that getting hold of data is the primary objective nowadays)

JS was indeed developed in just 10 days[1]. It was a way for netscape to differentiate itself. It is also why it has so many... quirks.

1. https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J...

For me that is the believable part; it's easy to hack together something JavaScript-like using lex and yacc and also probably not too hard to bolt it onto your own browser. It would be reasonably bug-free, too, as there was no standard to test it against.

I do find it hard to believe that Netscape managed to decide this was a (minimal) viable product, produce a press release, and present it to the world in the remaining (at most 21, including Memorial Day, but according to Wikipedia at most 13) days in May.

On the other hand, Netscape may have heard rumors about Sun announcing Java (quite possible if Sun wanted to have a Netscape plugin to demo at launch) and decided they had to have something on the same day. I can't find that on the web, though.

EDIT: http://www2.ldc.lu.se/temadag95/javascript.txt and http://www.phase3.net/sun-announces-java-at-sunworld/ seem to show that the May 23 date in Wikipedia is correct for Java, but incorrect for JavaScript. That date should be December 4, 1995.

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