It's odd how most people that haven't used a VM with GC are amazed by Go (no VM) and WASM (no GC) but still fail to understand that with a GC _AND_ VM you can code something that doesn't crash even if you make a big mistake!
And they haven't even bothered to try it out!
To use anything other than JavaSE/C# on the server you really need very good arguments!
Or being amazed by Go's compile speed, when Turbo Pascal and Object Pascal compilers were already doing that in the 1980's, or finding WASM innovative when polyglot bytecodes with no GC also go back to the early 1980's, like Amsterdam Compiler Kit EM as one example among many.
The innovation in WASM is more about getting all the major players in the browser space to agree and support it as a first-class citizen in the web stack. That polyglot bytecodes existed in the early 1980's does nothing for the web.
About the pipe dream of WASM there are 3 problems:
1) Compile times (both WASM and the browser)
2) If you thought Applets where insecure (btw they wheren't) wait until the .js (also a VM with GC...) bindings that you are forced to go through to reach anything from WASM securely gets attention!
3) If you build for the browser you have Intel, Nvidia, Microsoft and Google (do you work there, might explain things) to deal with on Windows. You DON'T want that... use C to build for linux on ARM/RISC-V has to be one of your options and then all that work you spent on getting WASM to work is wasted. (because you won't have the performace/electricity/money for the cycles you need in the long term)
Edit: Please don't replace Python (that you should probably never have touched) with Go...
1) No one was realistically compiling C++ or Python to Java though. WASM is not new tech as the other poster said — it’s people coming together to support one compile target that also works on the web, which itself is the crowning achievement.
2) Building a secure VM is easy. You only need to give it access to things it should have access to. If a VM has only math instructions, it’s not going to access the file system. My computer can’t poke my nose because there is literally no machine instruction for it.
Java did not build its VM that way. Instead, the JVM had full access to everything and individual functions were blacklisted within Java applications and this was enforced by Java code running in the same machine as the attacker’s code. Naturally every blacklist works like a sieve.
When I think about it, the memory security is probably the weakest point of WASM and probably also the reason nothing of value has come out of that initiative yet.
How does WASM protect memory?
Or maybe there is something valuable made in WASM and I don't know about it, Figma is I think, but I'm not in the target audience.
I just wrote some Go last weekend and the compile time was very slow. It reminded me of Scala. Any way I switched to Ruby and didn't have to deal with it any more. Turbo Pascal really was fast, but I don't see that in Go.
And they haven't even bothered to try it out!
To use anything other than JavaSE/C# on the server you really need very good arguments!