Comment by pjmlp 8 days ago
/rant mode on
Every few years since Xerox PARC, we get yet another attempt to bytecode userspace.
So far only IBM i, ChromeOS and Android managed to stick around, mostly thanks for their owners having the "my way or the highway" attitude, with management willing to support the teams no matter for how long it takes.
/rant mode off
Anyway, all the best for the project, looks cool.
I recommend not engaging. I've tried once or twice, and when I shared a concrete example[0] of a real problem wasm solves for me that I'm not aware of another way to do, pjmlp just stopped responding. I'm not sure what their motivations are but it's too bad they choose to distract from someone's awesome project the person has spent years working on.
And yet you decided to spend around 5 minutes writing to me, instead of collapsing the comment.
Here is tip for you as well, learn from the past, before doing any kind of WebAssembly marketing of how innovative it happens to be, versus JVM as if there was never anything else done.
The idea is so obviously beneficial that we'll keep having them until one manages to get entrenched firmly enough to become the standard.
wasm is likely to be that thing for the simple reason that it actually pursues this goal. JVM notionally does (or did? what does Oracle say these days?), but its bytecode is so much more high-level that it's not even in the same ballpark.
What matters is what is available for developers on userspace, regardless if they like it or not.
Great technology sadly wins on merit.
Technology wins on either being cheaply available, in a worse is better fashion, as devs rather drink free lemon juice instead of nice costly orange one, or by having companies with willingness and deep pockets to push it no matter what.
You seem to frequently appear in threads involving WebAssembly. Each time you do, I see you point out how bytecode VMs have been done before. And, every time, it doesn’t contribute anything interesting to the conversation.
I don’t mean this in a hostile way, however, it has become frustrating finding this predictable and low effort comment from you every time I open an HN thread on WebAssembly — and, frankly, I’ve begun collapsing comments whenever I see your username.
Every iteration on the concept brings different approaches and tradeoffs made from lessons learned from previous attempts. This is just how engineering, and our industry, works.
I don’t mean disrespect. I assume you are probably speaking from a place of experience. I would be so much more interested hearing your thoughts on the minutiae than basic pattern recognition.