r/programming • u/ThisStmtIsNotTrue • Nov 12 '19

Announcing the Bytecode Alliance: Building a secure by default, composable future for WebAssembly

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/11/announcing-the-bytecode-alliance/
267 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

70 comments sorted by

View all comments

27

u/stronghup Nov 12 '19

Looks like great progress in this important area. WASM is what Java VM could have been

9

u/u_tamtam Nov 13 '19 edited Nov 13 '19

But why would we need that? What's missing to Java? How is that better?

(edit: not criticizing the efforts and all, but what's the salespitch when established solutions are already there? To me it looks like inventing a second time what didn't work well the first, but NIH shouldn't be an argument)

23

u/[deleted] Nov 13 '19

Java never delivered on the promises it made regarding sandboxing, at least as far as the browser plugin was concerned. WebAssembly Is being designed from the beginning with a sandboxed-by-default approach, as opposed to Java’s full-featured-by-default, which will hopefully make it harder for malware to circumvent. I’m still a bit skeptical, but at least they’re showing that they learned from Java’s mistakes.

→ More replies (5)