Hi! (one of the authors of Spin here)
Interesting to hear your thoughts on this, why do you think that?
We believe that the things that make WebAssembly attractive in the browser (compact binary, near-native speed, the sandbox isolation model) make it really compelling outside the browser, on the server.
> It has frontends for the following programming languages: C, Pascal, Modula-2, Occam, and BASIC.
> Maximum portability is achieved by using an intermediate language using bytecode, called EM. Each language front-end produces EM object files, which are then processed through several generic optimisers before being translated by a back-end into native machine code.
> The hardware isolation provided by the TIMI allowed IBM to replace the AS/400's 48-bit IMPI architecture with the 64-bit RS64 architecture in 1995. Applications compiled on systems using the IMPI instruction set could run on top of the newer RS64 systems without any code changes, recompilation or emulation, while also allowing those applications to avail of 64-bit addressing
I think this is an excellent point — while we do try to give acknowledgement to the previous technology that paved the way for what we are doing (there are a few articles that treat microservices, containers, serverless https://fermyon.com/blog/index), I agree that we could do a better job at talking about programming languages and language runtimes.
We believe that the things that make WebAssembly attractive in the browser (compact binary, near-native speed, the sandbox isolation model) make it really compelling outside the browser, on the server.