On: Announcing WCGI: WebAssembly and CGI

[ThePhysicist]

Funny that most people seem to have forgotten that browsers used to ship with Java support. Not saying that was a good thing, but 20 years ago you could run JVM apps in the browser without issues. Also, there are dozens of language runtimes for the JVM, e.g. Ruby, Python, Golang, Javascript, Scheme, .... And regarding proprietary software, Wasmer is a for-profit startup that seems to offer open-source tooling with the hope the ecosystem will standardize on it and give them opportunities to monetize that. So not that much unlike Java I'd say.

[akira2501 → ThePhysicist]

> but 20 years ago you could run JVM apps in the browser without issues

That was definitely not my experience at that time using a linux desktop.

[KyeRussell → akira2501]

I’m sure that compared to doing anything else on a Linux desktop it was just fine. You made your bed.

[akira2501 → KyeRussell]

It was not. It was demonstrably worse. It had it's own janky UI that barely worked, it failed to understand the filesystem most of the time, and it failed to integrate cleanly with any other devices on the system.

Everything _else_ was able to do this just fine, in particular it's main competition, Adobe flash. That was actually _almost_ a first class experience and I didn't need to track down and install "icedtea" to make it all work. It just worked out of the box.

The JVM promised "write once, run anywhere." You can blame me for that failure, if you like, but it was then and always was a flat lie. You simply choose to ignore this.

[throwaway50609 → ThePhysicist]

Funny that you forgot about all the security issues of JVM applets that Wasm finally solved

[baq → throwaway50609]

And now you can run a wasm jvm: https://leaningtech.com/cheerpj/ (there are others, too)

[eyberg → throwaway50609]

Like this one?

  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>

  int main() {
    char *s = "world";

    s[0] = 'o';
    s[1] = 'w';
    s[2] = 'n';
    s[3] = 'e';
    s[4] = 'd';

    printf("Hello, %s\n", s);
  }

[throwaway50609 → eyberg]

Just compiled and ran it on my system within Wasm, my computer is still fine. Your point?

The point of Wasm is - programs can and will malfunction (and some will be malicious), so we have to protect the environment that runs it.

[mixmastamyk → ThePhysicist]

Believe a plugin need to be installed first. Fuzzy memory says the JRE install set it up for you.