I have honestly been more excited about Wasm for desktop than I am for the web. And I'm really excited about it for the Web. Really cool to see this use case pop up right as I'm trying to integrate it into my stack!
I've never really thought about wasm for the desktop (I've thought about it for server and of course browser), can you elaborate on your excitement? Is it just for this sort of bootstrapping application, or are there other benefits?
Write once, run anywhere… but this time the dream will come true!
Nearly every desktop is still x86 and just a couple years ago that was entirely true, and yet write-once-run-anywhere wasn't remotely close to true.
WASM as a result isn't changing anything here, since the assembly is very extremely not remotely close to the issue with having a portable binary.
Wasm is an opportunity for all platforms to adopt a single container format for architecture-independent binary code, and with uniforms APIs being defined on top of that; they are already standardizing a subset of POSIX. None of the bits here are really new, but the big difference this time is that it's not owned by any one of the major players (like e.g. Java and .NET were), and the design process is truly collaborative across the entire industry. This makes it politically viable.
So, now the effort is being rebooted with WASM Components.