a “cross-platform” assembly format could, in time, make introducing new hardware architectures a bit easier.
for example, these guys link to a discord channel to chat about their work, but i can’t join it easily because even though Discord ships a Linux client, they only ship it for x86 and not arm. further down the road, i’d like to try some RISC-V devices: that’ll be that same experience times ten. a portable assembly format has the chance to overcome this.
We weren't unaware of these things. Wasm is the first low-level format to instantly have broad availability, becoming available in all web browsers in 2017. AFAICT none of the previous formats had low overhead platform-independent in-process sandboxing, and certainly none had a machine-checked proof of type system soundness.
As for how sound the type system is in the face of attacks at the Flash, ActiveX and Java applets scale, it remains to be seen, although there are already some USENIX papers slowly coming up regarding WebAssembly actual security.
hey i’m not saying it will or won’t succeed on that front — just that it’s a motivating factor.
but also, look at its neighbors. Vulkan/SPIR-V has made it standard to ship bytecode-level shaders (graphical or compute) which are device agnostic but still performant. even if we’re cursed to try this “architecture agnostic” stuff a hundred times, i don’t think we can say there hasn’t been any progress. that progress only comes from people trying, even if 9 out of 10 serious attempts are flops.
Isn't Discord's desktop client just an Electron wrapper around their website? It seems like there might be an easier way to get that running on other platforms.
If I wanted the full-fat Discord app (rather than a browser website or PWA, or a third-party client Discord will ban you over), I'd look into https://github.com/SpacingBat3/WebCord (which I think isn't detected and banned, but I cannot guarantee this or that they won't rewrite Discord to the point you can get banned for using it).
Do you have any cases of people getting banned over it? It would be scary, uBlock Origin blocks /api/*/science and it would be terrifying if running an adblocker could get you banned from Discord.
for example, these guys link to a discord channel to chat about their work, but i can’t join it easily because even though Discord ships a Linux client, they only ship it for x86 and not arm. further down the road, i’d like to try some RISC-V devices: that’ll be that same experience times ten. a portable assembly format has the chance to overcome this.