One of the interesting prospects of WebAssembly is that it can be used for safe and portable sandboxing on systems that aren’t web browsers. This is somewhat undersold by at least some parts of the wasm ecosystem, in my opinion, but has some real value. Being able to distribute executables and libraries in a portable bytecode that gets locally compiled seems to me like a strict improvement on distributing platform-specific binaries, even if the programs are open source and you can just compile them from source if you really want to. Given that we’re increasingly living less in an x86_64 monoculture, with diverse good non-x86 hardware widely available, this idea seems more and more useful. So, as someone who mostly wants to write portable programs that run on desktop-style hardware, let’s try to actually use webassembly for this and see how it goes.
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