this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
48 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
80795 readers
5143 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It isn’t interesting for being bytecode. Rather for being the first universal sandboxed runtime for the browser and elsewhere. Being able to write in many languages and compile to wasm targets is awesome. Safety guarantees and performance are both great too. And it can run in tiny environments.
Maybe we should get away from "browser than can run apps" and move towards "app sandbox that also happens to render html".
Except that it isn't really the first iteration of any of those things. Java did most of 'em more than a quarter century ago: browser-embedable, multiple languages could target the JVM, and, yes, sandboxed—the only issue was startup (not runtime) performance. That wasm doesn't share those startup performance woes makes it useful, but not revolutionary.
As for tiny environments, a typical desktop system from around 1999 is somewhat similar to a Pi Zero W in terms of ability.
I would imagine a Pi Zero is significantly more powerful than a 1999 desktop system.
Pi zero has a 1Ghz single core and 512 MB RAM. 1999 would be a P3, which started out from 500 MHz and I believe RAM was less 512 MB at that points.
And that's just high level figures, that ignore faster RAM speed, massive improvements in IPC / CPU microarchitecture.
I would even speculate the hypothetical 3D capabilities of 1999 desktop could probably be simulated in software.
The sandboxes are different. The embeddable Java plugin sandbox was a bit different and susceptible to confused deputy and other attacks. So yeah, I guess you can say it is iterative but they’re kind of worlds apart. You can run thousands of wasm modules in a single process and have them all be completely isolated. Its performance and security gains, portability, and usability are all superb.
I guess I can’t really defend it well, but I think it is interesting and important.