It can be run outside a browser, and is much more performant than using the whole browser. The future is very likely going to consolidate around WASM and WebGPU, regardless of what hardware you're targeting. If you want more performant specs, it will be driven through a public and consensus driven way... there are far too many economies of scale to standardization for it not to be.
The days of building an ecosystem around a closed, proprietary language/protocol/spec are over. The browser was just the first to bridge the gap... now we move on to WASM, and maybe 10 years from now something newer
Yeah. You’re right. THIS will be the time that open wins. When most peoples primary computing is running an OS developed by one of two companies that have a strong incentive to maintain walled gardens.
Largest /s imaginable.
Your comment is pretty far into LARPing territory.
Heard of Kubernetes, Docker/OCI, and CNCF? A crapload of computing now is running within Linux (open) in containers (open). Sure, end users use MacOS and Windows as the base OS, but a lot of programs they interact with now are running in a browser or Electron (all open standards-driven things). WASM’s future is as a much more performant and lightweight alternative to containers, to the point where it could be run and used by anyone. containers require a shitload of configuration to be able to run them, but a wasm module can be packaged up in a native assembly that requires zero runtime setup for the end user. Just install and go.
You could say the same thing of Go apps, but they certainly haven't taken over computing. They got a lot of attention from certain corners, but I think everyone acknowledges now that it's just another compiled language. That doesn't solve all your problems, it just solves one. Maybe WASM solves two problems by not needing to be cross-compiled. But there's still a thousand problems left, many of which are addressed by containerization, but not addressed by WASM.
The innovation of "docker containers" as a total solution is more akin to a POSIX standard than the Go language. Containers only became popular because of Docker, not because of containers themselves. Docker is a solution to a dozen different problems. "A container" is really just a chroot in a unique namespace. Again, that's basically just one problem solved. The functional combination of all the features of container orchestration software and interoperability is where the actual value of containers lies. Not in the container, but in the 12 different problems that are now all solved in a universal way by all the different solutions that deal with containers in the same way.
If WASM can evolve an entire ecosystem and standard around all the problems needed to be solved to run software easier, then sure, it could be revolutionary. We'll see if that happens in a way that is easy to use. My bet is it won't happen.
The browser/web is already open. People are writing cross platform apps in browser containers. Open is already the standard. WASM simply closes the performance gap between “widely accepted open standards” and native.
You seem confused… fewer and fewer people are writing software in OS locked apis/contexts. Back in the day it was much closer to 100%
It can be run outside a browser, and is much more performant than using the whole browser. The future is very likely going to consolidate around WASM and WebGPU, regardless of what hardware you're targeting. If you want more performant specs, it will be driven through a public and consensus driven way... there are far too many economies of scale to standardization for it not to be.
The days of building an ecosystem around a closed, proprietary language/protocol/spec are over. The browser was just the first to bridge the gap... now we move on to WASM, and maybe 10 years from now something newer
https://wasmer.io/
https://wasi.dev/