Can someone ELI5 what problem this solves? I think of WebAssembly as being a tool for getting code written in to run in a web client. Can't I already run code written in on a server that I control? Heck, PG went on at some length in one of his early essays about how that was one of the great things about the Web: you could use any language you wanted on the server. Even Common Lisp...
WASM is also useful for distributing a single binary blob that runs on different Operating Systems and CPU architectures, instead of 'stamping out' NxM native executables. This area overlaps more with Java and .NET (but with more/different language options) than 'an alternative to JS in the browser'.
For instance I have a C++ shader compiler which includes some massive 3rd party libraries (glslangValidator, SPIRVTools and SPIRVCross) which takes forever to compile, so distributing in source code form is not really an option, and the only alternative is to ship precompiled binaries for each supported OS/CPU combination. Currently I do this via GH Actions, which kinda works, but just building a single WASM blob and shipping that to users (who then would need to install one of the WASM runtimes though) sounds kinda interesting.
PS: WASM may also be useful as universal plugin format. For instance the new Microsoft flight sim uses WASM instead of scripting or native DLLs for modding:
https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/Programming_Tools/WASM...
Java’s GraalVM can do plenty of languages, on top of running managed ones much faster. I don’t see novelty here.
I suppose the "novelty" is the existence of compilation to WASM target in more and more compiler toolchains, so you can use things. Though to your point GraalVM work is also progressing a lot! Nice to have a lot of energy in this space in general
> I suppose the "novelty" is the existence of compilation to WASM target in more and more compiler toolchains
Which ones?
AFAIK WSAM runs only "C-like" language properly.
Everything else is a major hack and slow as hell.
When it even exists of course. Because to my knowledge there aren't much languages that compile to WASM besides C/C++/Rust. Because WASM lacks features for VM languages (and that is the big majority of languages). Did something in this regard change lately?