[kwlug-disc] From 36-th C3, about smaller app stacks

[Doug Moen]

> The ideas presented in this talk are certainly valid, otherwise they
> wouldn't be re-invented every decade. The questions is: What is
> different this time that might give in main-stream traction?

Oberon was a research project that was incompatible with all existing software.
You had to write your software from scratch to get it into Oberon,
and there wasn't a killer app to motivate people to do this.

Dot Net is owned by Microsoft.
The JVM is owned by Oracle, which is much worse.

WASM and WASI have a bright future ahead.
First of all, WASM runs in web browsers. That is huge.
It is being implemented by Google, Mozilla, Apple, etc.
It is a fully open standard. It is a W3C standard, hence there are no issues
of IP being owned by a single, evil, abuse megacorp like Oracle.

OCaml is also fully open source.
For a long time it has seemed like niche technology to me,
but they've been around for a long time, and their mindshare is
growing, due to Facebook, the Reason-ML language, and now this.