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Comment by zaarn | Hacker News Reader

You're not confined by the instruction set below. It no longer matters if your language supports PowerPC, Power8, x86, x86_64, ARMv5 through v8 or even more exotics. Similar to the Java VM, which definitely showed the advantage of being more easily portable, it decouples the binary you deploy from the actual hardware.

Rust and Go have support for many targets but not as many as other compilers (GCC), a coverage problem that can be fixed by using WASM as intermediate and porting a WASM Runtime to that architecture.

Something like Innative would also enable desktop applications to be independent of the OS and architecture. The same binary would run on x86_64 Windows, PowerPC Mac and ARMv8 Linux.

It's basically Java but you don't have to use Java to get all the good parts.

(Disclaimer: I know the main dev of innative and do some WASM work myself)

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> It no longer matters if your language supports PowerPC, Power8, x86, x86_64, ARMv5 through v8 or even more exotics

Yeah, instead it matters which WASM runtimes it supports and which archs those runtimes support.

But that's ok, we just need one more layer of abstraction to fix the whole mess.

For innative it matters what LLVM supports and LLVM supports already dictates the support of many programming languages atleast as a superset (Rust and Go support a subset of what LLVM supports), I don't see how this is "one more layer of abstraction will fix the whole mess" when it reuses existing abstractions.

WASM is based off of a specification, so compilers target the spec instead of an individual runtime.

It’s yet another UNCOL (1958) or ANDF (1987) :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_Neutral_Distribut...

Doubtful considering how much work is being done around WASM.

Usually being hyped by people that apparently don't know the history of bytecode formats since the early 60's.

I'm well aware of the history of bytecode formats, Java was pretty successful for a while, even managed to get in the Browser and only failed there due to a lack of a DOM Interaction story and similar integration problems.

There is already plenty of companies that deployed WASM on their stack (like Ebay, they use Wasm for their barcode scanner), it's not going away any time soon.

What lacking of DOM interaction story?!

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/ma...

The CDAPI barely worked when it was released. It worked but poorly to the point that the Java Devs would have better not bothered at all. It's such a poor story for DOM Interaction that it effectively does not exist. Everyone prefered to use some UI library to render UI themselves.

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