No one is going to port a million lines of code to a web assembly runtime.
Yeah they are.
We talked about JavaScript code.
No idea why you omitted that.
Porting C++ - and plenty of others - to a webassembly runtime is relatively straight forward.
Many tool chains are LLVM based. So for Rust etc. you get it out of the box ...
Kind of the point is that you can't change the type of a variable in a static language, by default, but you can for example in C++ with a type like this:
http://en.cppreference.com/w/...
This was not what we were talking about, which you pretty well know.
So why the nitpicking?
So conclusion: porting a few million lines of existing JavaScript code to webassembly, does not make much sense. Especially not, if that new light weight JavaScript specialized VM: is much faster.
Obviously you can run the V8 JavaScript engine on webassembly instead of running it as a native C/C++ program that happens to interpret/compile JavaScript. But guess what: C8 uses webassembly as its intermediate language and interprets/jits from there. So switching from a JavaScript runtime, that internally is based on webassembly, to another webassembly runtime with a compiler of JavaScript for that runtime ... makes only sense in rare cases.
So the guys who made this new one ... are probably using under the hood webassembly as well. I was looking for a webassembly runtime written in Dart, I would like to put it into an App I have. I wanted a fast and easy FFI to dart, so one based on C/C++ is at the moment not a straight forward option.
Lets see ...