This delusion that the web is an amazing feat of engineering is frankly astonishing to me. It is constantly broken and basically entirely relies on a single browser engine controlled entirely by one of the largest organizations on the planet. It has well known security footguns at every turn.
It isn't even unprecedented. Way back in the 90s Another World used a bytecode VM for portability between hardware platforms. It ran on a whole lot of them and had input, graphics, and sound. Before that Infocom used a VM for its text adventures that was ported to many platforms. P-Code existed before that. The modern web browser, and web code, is a jankier, significantly more complicated, design-by-intertia/committee/def-facto-monopoly hybrid monstrosity. It's a document viewer with incoherent bits glued on until it kinda almost works like an application platform.
> Think of all the layers of abstraction and code that is necessary to have millions of combinations of hardware + software all show the same thing!
Not that f'ing many if you didn't engineer your VM like a blind monkey! Cross platform VMs are not a new idea, at all, and that's essentially what the modern web is, only it's the most Frankenstein version of that idea ever conceived.
It isn't even unprecedented. Way back in the 90s Another World used a bytecode VM for portability between hardware platforms. It ran on a whole lot of them and had input, graphics, and sound. Before that Infocom used a VM for its text adventures that was ported to many platforms. P-Code existed before that. The modern web browser, and web code, is a jankier, significantly more complicated, design-by-intertia/committee/def-facto-monopoly hybrid monstrosity. It's a document viewer with incoherent bits glued on until it kinda almost works like an application platform.
> Think of all the layers of abstraction and code that is necessary to have millions of combinations of hardware + software all show the same thing!
Not that f'ing many if you didn't engineer your VM like a blind monkey! Cross platform VMs are not a new idea, at all, and that's essentially what the modern web is, only it's the most Frankenstein version of that idea ever conceived.