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Top-level
 The idea would be to have a standardized-as-much-as-possible VM interface, and then your OS can implement that. New OS just needs a new implementation. The point is protection against compatibility problems: it should be possible to run a PC game from 1982 and a video editing program from 2005, in the same way and be sure that you'll still be able to run them in another 30 years. 10 comments
  @mdhughes, I'm assuming that by “it's”, you mean “it is” rather than “it has”…  @Smoljaguar @foone kragen also wrote on this a lot: https://dercuano.github.io/notes/uvc-archiving.html  That's a solution for a different problem - letting you write games/other software now that can run on many machines in the future. (Also its capabilities and performance are strictly limited by design, which is totally legit.) I think what Foone is dreaming of is more like a super-duper version of VMWare or other hypervisor, to let you run *existing* software targeted to any OS, under any other OS/hardware. And hell yeah that would be a huge step forward. @foone This is basically just Java If It Didn't Suck. The idea behind Java was pretty much exactly this. In practice it was too advanced for its time, and by the time it was "usable" it was unusable for that purpose because of the breaking changes it took to get it to "usable" rendering the old code unusable. |
Gregory's Server
@foone Well, we did have Java, and Flash. Both made the mistake of object loading from the network which made them instant virus loaders. WASM is New Safer Java but dumb because it's built in a web browser.