Is there any reason to believe that a major new browser tech, WASM, will ever have support dropped for its early versions?
Even if the old versions are not as loved (i.e.: engine optimized for it and immediately ready to be executed) as the old versions, emulation methods work wonders and could easily be downloaded on-demand by browsers needing to run "old WASM".
I'm quite optimistic for the forwards-compatibility proposed here.
Sure. Just recently Google was pushing to remove XSLT in Chrome. Flash is a bit of a different beast but it died long ago.
However I don't think it matters too much. Here WASM is not targeting the browser, and there are many more runtimes for WASM, in many diverse languages, and they outnumber browsers significantly. It won't die easily.
Indeed, I guess in a while it is going to look pretty much like the older formats relying on obscure bytecode look now. Possibly the kind of data analytics it aims has some special requirements, but I would expect a simple format like CSV (or DSV, more generally) to be more future-proof generally.
Old websites still run very well.
Is there any reason to believe that a major new browser tech, WASM, will ever have support dropped for its early versions?
Even if the old versions are not as loved (i.e.: engine optimized for it and immediately ready to be executed) as the old versions, emulation methods work wonders and could easily be downloaded on-demand by browsers needing to run "old WASM".
I'm quite optimistic for the forwards-compatibility proposed here.
Sure. Just recently Google was pushing to remove XSLT in Chrome. Flash is a bit of a different beast but it died long ago.
However I don't think it matters too much. Here WASM is not targeting the browser, and there are many more runtimes for WASM, in many diverse languages, and they outnumber browsers significantly. It won't die easily.
> Old websites still run very well.
<blink> is gone. In C, gets is gone. It may take only one similar minor change to make huge amounts of data unreadable by newer WASM versions.
Indeed, I guess in a while it is going to look pretty much like the older formats relying on obscure bytecode look now. Possibly the kind of data analytics it aims has some special requirements, but I would expect a simple format like CSV (or DSV, more generally) to be more future-proof generally.
> in a while it is going to look pretty much like the older formats relying on obscure bytecode look now
Depends how obscure. You can play Z-machine games on pretty much anything now.