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I wrote more on this above, so I won't repeat myself in this comment, but yes WebAssembly is a "virtual machine byte code". It is literally a bytecode language

I wrote more on this above, so I won't repeat myself in this comment, but yes WebAssembly is a "virtual machine byte code". It is literally a bytecode language that doesn't target physical machines. It bears no resemblence to x86 or ARM so it has to be JIT compiled or interpreted. Saying it doesn't target a VM because it targets "the web" is meaningless.

n00b101 10y ago
Fair enough. You are correct, WebAssembly is a bytecode for the underlying machinery of current ECMAScript/JavaScript engines. I think you raise a very good question, why did the WebAssembly committee decide to implement their own stack machine bytecode instead of re-using an existing bytecode like JVM or CLI (which, interestingly, is an ECMA standard)? It's troubling. The closest explanation I could find is: "Why not a fully-general stack machine? The WebAssembly stack machine is restricted to structured control flow and structured use of the stack. This greatly simplifies one-pass verification, avoiding a fixpoint computation like that of other stack machines such as the Java Virtual Machine (prior to stack maps). This also simplifies compilation and manipulation of WebAssembly code by other tools. Further generalization of the WebAssembly stack machine is planned post-MVP, such as the addition of multiple return values from control flow constructs and function calls." [1] [1] http://webassembly.org/docs/rationale/ http://webassembly.org/docs/rationale/
n00b101 10y ago
I found the relevant discussion on this: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/960 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/960