D could catch this wave: web assembly

[Abdulhaq via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 18 June 2015 at 10:36:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:

> Why can't they just admit that the core architecture of the web 
> is horrific, ie an antiquated document format based on some 
> shitty 50-year old IBM markup language 
> (https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language), a programming runtime that was cranked out in 10 days in the middle of the browser wars and certainly shows it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Netscape_and_JavaScript), and a stylesheet language hacked on top to eliminate some redundancy, _by adding yet another language_?!
>

Of course this is exactly true and it drives me mad too, but you 
can't just jettison it in favour of a better architecture. Given 
that it must be supported else it will break the interweb, what 
else is there to do but do but to build the new stuff on the 
side. With a canvas, OpenGL backing and a half-decent 'assembly 
language' to compile down to, it could be made into (ultimately) 
a satisfactory development platform. You would only need to use 
DOM and CSS for the top canvas/OpenGL node and from there down 
it's all however you want to roll it.

As for performance then granted it seems bizarre to require all 
these layers below, but I remember watching a very interesting 
video about how running on the OS is subject to large overheads 
in the kernel, while running in the browser can bypass that and 
hence is not such a performance drop as you might expect - 
unfortunatel I can't dig up the link.