Hacker News Reader

Asm.js was a brillant idea, but wasm is more like a bytecode. This is where is the part from NaCl the author missed. Wasm is derived from asm.js but also an improvement on LLVM to make a portable bytecode, that LLVM is not. One more step in the LLVM toolchain to get portability...

View on HN

WASM isn't based on LLVM. WASM is a compiler target, but compilers other than LLVM can target WASM.

And WASM is now the defacto portable Bitcode. Just as JS took over the world, so will WASM. In six months, WASM will have had more program launches than the totality of .Net and the JVM.

We have yet to fathom how far reaching WASM will be. Did I say WASM enough times? I end with only this. WASM.

> "In six months, WASM will have had more program launches than the totality of .Net and the JVM."

I don't think so. The only languages that can currently target WASM are languages that don't need GC. It'll take a while before the tooling and functionality is mature enough to support the most commonly used languages (aside from C/C++).

JS didn't take over the world, web did. And if we don't talk plugins, then there wasn't much choice in the matter if you wanted to do things clientside.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com