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Comment by pocketaces | Hacker News Reader

You use 32-bit ARM assembly on 32-bit ARM, AArch64 assembly on AArch64, and x86 assembly on x86. There is no handing over a monopoly to anyone.

While the mentioned browser functionality have existed for decades, then that does not change the fact that for the past decade then almost everytime I have had to download a native application I have had to select the correct type of executable myself. So the argument still stands. Developers should implement the mentioned functionality on a download page for their native application, instead of trying to make everything a web application.

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I think that saying what someone should be doing is very short sighted, it's almost certain that they will not listen to you, especially since you're making their jobs harder and it's unsafe for the end user. Instead, let's focus on things that the developers actually want, like WASM, so we can have something decent out of it; dismissing it is definitely not going to help and WASM is already here to stay.

BTW how do you propose to safely run untrusted application with no built in support of parallelization in parallel, maybe even on multiple machines? How do you safely directly reference an object that is owned by another (again, untrusted) module, again, maybe even on a different machine (e.g. using RDMA through Infiniband)? These are just some of the possibilities that WASM is offering.

> While the mentioned browser functionality have existed for decades, then that does not change the fact that for the past decade then almost everytime I have had to download a native application I have had to select the correct type of executable myself.

Think about why that is. It's because Web site authors frequently don't "do the right thing", and they instead do what is most convenient. Following that line of reasoning, it is naive to think that Web site authors would have offered ARM executables at all back in 2007. That is the entire problem.

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