Yes, this is my primary personal motivator as co-champion of the proposal. But, going “fully virtual” is hard because of the very wide array of use cases for wasm.

For example, there are embedded users of wasm whose devices don’t even have MMUs. And even when running on a device with an MMU, the host may not want to allow arbitrary mappings, e.g. if using wasm as a plugin system in a database or something.

It’s likely imo that any “fully virtual” features will be part of the wasm web API and not the core spec, if they happen at all.

This is a delightful take on a style of UI I really love. Separating the UI logic from drawing with a set of draw commands is an excellent and very versatile idea - I first saw it in microui, and the separation allowed me to easily use the library in the browser using WASM and Canvas2D. (https://rxi.github.io/microui_v2_an_implementation_overview....)

Also, doing layout in WASM and rendering to HTML is a great idea that I can't believe I never thought of before.

I think the culture of JS has been reinforced over time, and the result is a novel form of paranoia. npm makes package-sharing easy, developers share trivial packages, people use trivial packages, people rationalize trivial packages, people teach beginners never to write code, beginners think they can never write code, beginners grow up and here we are.

Certainly the language is quirky, but it really doesn't change that much. Frameworks have come and gone but JavaScript itself is still the same. is-number would have looked much the same 15 years ago, if anyone was crazy enough to actually distribute it.

I agree, I think. The language issues, and NPM technical issues, are small contributing factors. I'd argue the culture was more a result of the physics of deploying code over the internet to varied and unreliable browsers than it was to do with anything NPM did.

You, specifically.

If we had perfect knowledge, we could choose perfect libraries. But we don't. Maybe someday.

Yeah it's a baffling example to me. WordArt was really popular! People liked using it! The fact that it has aesthetically gone out of favor, years later, has nothing to do with software quality.

That doesn't make sense to me. Unless users are presented with alternatives, they will have no choice but to use the garbage they are given - nor will they be able to recognize how much better software can be.

Better software has to start with the programmers. We're the only ones who ACTUALLY know what the hardware is capable of, and the only ones capable of setting those new expectations. This is why we aimed the manifesto at programmers. It is not the user's fault.

> Ideally there would be superior alternatives to something like Electron while still remaining accessible.

That's exactly why we in the Handmade Network community are building Orca (https://orca-app.dev/). It will take a while, but that's the goal.

Designing the platform APIs around C is generally the right move in our opinion. Of course we want Orca to support multiple languages, but we also want APIs that will bind well to many languages and that will be flexible and performant. Furthermore, WebAssembly today is a great fit for C-like languages, and...less of a great fit for other paradigms.

We already have strong WIP bindings for Odin and Zig, and intend for our documentation to strongly feature all three of C, Odin, and Zig when we launch the next major version.

The next Wheel Reinvention Jam will be in September! We're just finalizing our plans for that jam and our smaller Visibility Jam in July. If you're interested in participating, then join the Handmade Network Discord server (link on our home page at https://handmade.network/).