Wasm is a powerful new technology to deliver interactive applications. Before the advent of the web, there were already many developers building client/server applications, where the client apps ran on a PC (typically with Microsoft Windows) and the server apps ran on a company-owned system (typically with NetWare, OS/2, Windows NT, or Unix). In such systems, developers could choose their favorite language for the client app. Some people used Visual Basic, others used FoxPro or Delphi, and many other languages were in wide use.
However, for such systems, the deployment of updates was a kind of hell, because of several possible issues, such as ensuring that every client PC had the proper runtime system and that all clients got the updates at the same time. These problems were solved by JavaScript running in web browsers, as it is a ubiquitous platform on which frontend software could be downloaded and executed. This had some drawbacks though: developers were forced to...