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It's not possible. As soon as WebAssembly gets as big as the web, someone will implement a browser-embedded browser in WebAssembly that runs in the browser and we will be back to square 1 in this kafkaesque nightmare we call Web.



Like running the Windows version of Gimp in Wine in X Window in Chrome inside Firefox on a Mac? http://imgur.com/a/wRals

From: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...


Lol. Can't wait for this piece of art to arrive, plus compile JavaScript web apps could compile to binaries


Down votes are unfair, this was quite funny.


Why would you think that it is a joke? It is true and how things have always gone!

When I got into computers it would have been ridiculous to imagine carrying around a computer running a different OS in a virtual machine, within which we were running a virtual network of small virtual machines existed to run programs written in a scripting language that itself runs in a VM!

Sounds crazy, right? And yet it isn't rare to find a developer on a Mac laptop running Linux in VirtualBox, inside of which they run Docker containers to run applications built on node.js. This is not done as a joke, it is done because it is a useful development environment for an application that is supposed to eventually be deployed to a cloud.

Portable software has been a motivating dream of our industry since forever. It was a selling point of COBOL, Pascal, HTML, Java, Flash, JQuery, and so on and so forth. The idea of deploying a known client target to get rid of browser differences is inevitable. It is just a question of who will be the first to do one that is good and fast enough to get mindshare.




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