WebAssembly isn’t JavaScript nor does it require JavaScript.

Your response is technically correct but misses the entire point of the video.

To make a tl;dr, the video talks about a technology called asm.js which other applications end up compiled into so they can run with near-native speeds on any system which supports asm.js. This technology ends up being a compilation target meaning that JS gets eventually forgotten as a language because everyone just compiles everything into asm.js which is executed natively on the kernel.

Just do a s/asm.js/WASM/g and it'll suddenly start making sense.

Okay, fair enough. I read the description but I didn’t watch the video, so it’s possible I’m lacking context. Thank you for clarifying.

Yes, the video is pretty amazing - Gary in 2014 managed to predict pretty much everything that's happening with WASM nowadays: the push for safe execution of software compiled in unsafe languages, a common VMesque instruction set, web browsers implementing it first and pushing the frontier in this regard, and now kernels also starting to be capable of running that in order to avoid the cost of switching rings.

What we're yet to see is this last point becoming the default, so execution of user programs kind-of makes a circle by returning to kernel mode, except now a trusted WASM-to-native compiler/runtime is responsible for ensuring system safety. Might happen in the next few years.

Reminds me of Singularity OS[1], where all programs were verified bytecode, allowing them to share address space with all the benefits that has.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_%28operating_syste...

Also the Common Lisp OS Mezzano[0] runs like that. It runs Doom and Quake by means of lowering C to LLVM-IR which is then lowered to a subset of CL which is then compiled by the trusted native Mezzano compiler.

[0] https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano/