Comment by flohofwoe

> WASM nowadays has become quite the monstrosity compared to NaCl/PNaCl

It's really the other way around, NaCl/PNaCl was quite the monstrosity that didn't fit into the browser runtime environment at all and required completely separate APIs to access 'platform features' - while access to existing web APIs had to go through an incredibly slow and cumbersome messaging layer - e.g. the people complaining today that WASM doesn't allow direct DOM access would have a complete mental breakdown with NaCl/PNaCl ;)

In a way, WASM is also an evolution of PNaCl (which was also a CPU-agnostic bytecode, but one that couldn't be standardized because it was an adhoc subset of LLVM IR).