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WebAssembly: An Attempt To Give the Web Its Own Bytecode
New submitter Josiah Daniels writes with this kernel from a much more detailed article at Ars Technica about what already looks like a very important initiative: WebAssembly is a new project being worked on by people from Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to produce a bytecode for the Web. WebAssembly, or wasm for short, is intended to be a portable bytecode that will be efficient for browsers to download and load, providing a more efficient target for compilers than plain JavaScript or even asm.js
The web is hardly usable anymore. Even the simplest web sites are slow as molasses, thanks to heaps of "active" content alongside the actual information. Now you're going to bestow your own runtime on us? Now that we've finally ditched Java and Flash?
This is ultimately where the browsers need to go. Many have tried in the past, but always from some side angle assuming that it had to be through a plugin or had to use Javascript as the underlying byte code, e.g. GWT. This could finally allow a wide array of languages to be used to build web applications, similar to the explosion of languages that now run on a JVM.
10 minutes working on a sig. What a waste.
Java virtual machine (JVM)
I've been saying this for twenty years.
Java tried to be this, and unfortunately came close enough to remove the incentive to improve but not quite good enough to really accomplish the goal.
Everything on the web is ultimately a crude hack on top of HTML, which is why there are new development and deployment frameworks constantly being created, because no-one has come up with something good.