Except developers have consistently chosen not to embed the JVM, CLR, or IBMi.

wasmtime (the current reference runtime implementation) is much more embeddable than these other options were/are, and is trivially embeddable in many languages today, with good performance. On top of being an option, it is being used, and WebAssembly is spreading cross-language, farther than the alternatives ever reached.

These things may look the same, but just like ssh/scp and dropbox, they're not the same once you zoom/dig in to what's different this time.

As if developers are consistently chosing to embedd WASM, just wait after the hype cycle dies.

What we have now is lots of hype, mostly by folks clueless of their history, in the venture to sell their cool startup idea based on WASM.

> As if developers are consistently chosing to embedd WASM, just wait after the hype cycle dies. > > What we have now is lots of hype, mostly by folks clueless of their history, in the venture to sell their cool startup idea based on WASM.

I don't think there's much of a hype cycle -- most of the air has been sucked out of the room by AI.

There aren't actually that many Wasm startups, but there are companies leveraging it to great success, and some of these cases are known. There is also the usefulness of Wasm as a target, and that is growing -- languages are choosing to build in the ability to generate wasm bytecode, just as they might support a new architecture. That's the most important part that other solutions seemingly never achieved.

The ecosystem is aiming for a least-changes-necessary approach -- integrating in a way that workflows and existing code does not have to change. This is a recipe for success.

I think it's a docker-shaped adoption curve -- most people may not think it is useful now, but it will silently and usefully be everywhere later. At some point, it will be trivial to ship a small WASM binary inside (or independent of) a container, and that will be much more desirable than building a container. The artifact will be smaller, more self-describing, work with language tooling (i.e. a world without Dockerfiles), etc.

I believe that the two most likely futures for the wasm-as-puglin-engine are mod in games and applications with a generic extension interface.

IMO in games developers would prefer something with a reasonable repl like lua or javascript (as a game is already assumed to be heavy if the mods are not performance critical running a V8 should not be a problem) for extensions in generic complex applications (things like, VSCode, Blender, Excel, etc.) I would posit that the wasm sandbox could be a really good way to enable granular-permission secure extenstion.