I have reasonably high hopes for WASM as a runtime, so I'm trying to thread a line between agreeing with you and disagreeing with you.
I do think that compiling C code to WASM is easier than compiling C code to Javascript, and I do think that WASM is going to open some doors to sandboxed native applications that the web just can't handle.
But at the same time, even forgetting about the cross-platform part, I have not seen an application framework for any platform -- even closed-down, highly consistent platforms like game consoles -- that offers the same feature-set as Flash.
So WASM may make this easier, but we have platforms already today that are extremely easy to target. If you're targeting PS4/XBox, you know exactly what drivers, software, and graphics stacks are going to be installed. And a Flash replacement doesn't exist for any of those devices. So I urge some caution about assuming that the tools you want are going to be quickly built for WASM.
In some ways, this is exactly the mistake that HTML5 advocates made with Flash. They assumed that all they needed to do was have APIs, and Adobe would do something to save Flash. But Adobe never really seemed to care. They had some half-hearted efforts to target devices like Android, but the Air runtime was never really good at that, and it didn't take over as a cross-platform desktop target the same way that modern Electron has. It seems intuitively obvious that if a cross-platform runtime existed that everyone loved, somebody would make a good graphics stack for it that was easy to use and that didn't require programming, but I'm not 100% certain that's actually true.
I think we're disagreeing less than you think, mostly just focusing on different things. I'll defer to you on Flash. I've never programmed in it directly. My observations are purely from the outside. I was just using it as an example for why I see potential in app runtimes.
I do think that compiling C code to WASM is easier than compiling C code to Javascript, and I do think that WASM is going to open some doors to sandboxed native applications that the web just can't handle.
But at the same time, even forgetting about the cross-platform part, I have not seen an application framework for any platform -- even closed-down, highly consistent platforms like game consoles -- that offers the same feature-set as Flash.
So WASM may make this easier, but we have platforms already today that are extremely easy to target. If you're targeting PS4/XBox, you know exactly what drivers, software, and graphics stacks are going to be installed. And a Flash replacement doesn't exist for any of those devices. So I urge some caution about assuming that the tools you want are going to be quickly built for WASM.
In some ways, this is exactly the mistake that HTML5 advocates made with Flash. They assumed that all they needed to do was have APIs, and Adobe would do something to save Flash. But Adobe never really seemed to care. They had some half-hearted efforts to target devices like Android, but the Air runtime was never really good at that, and it didn't take over as a cross-platform desktop target the same way that modern Electron has. It seems intuitively obvious that if a cross-platform runtime existed that everyone loved, somebody would make a good graphics stack for it that was easy to use and that didn't require programming, but I'm not 100% certain that's actually true.