edit: /s
I think that the issue comes in when people call it WebASM. ASM had different aims in 1960 than in 2017. In 1960 ASM was about minimizing register overlap and utilizing max CPU efficiency reels. Now, you have no idea what hardware your Web-whatever is going to run on, so how could you possibly optimize for CPU? The only real optimization would be optimizing software-engineer/developer attention+visualization and that would only come with an incredibly elegant breakdown of what screens need for a coder to be happy long into the future.
If there were some easy way for manufacturers to add "component" definitions for hardware devices, perhaps WebASM could become something amazing. However, the name ASM is likely to throw off too many would-be devs. At any rate, it's not meant to be assembly for the web, it's meant to be skeletal scaffolding for your amazing, native apps. Why else even bother.
Getting a bytecode that works more like common real machines will be a real performance boon. It doesn't need to match perfectly, it just needs to be similar enough, minimalistic and better than what we have now. The 'simple enough' part makes translation to native machine code easy enough and the minimal makes it easy for standards adoption. As for beating what we have now, you should read the article, because right now its javascript or nothing at all, and anything even vaguely more like a real machine can be optimized better than javascript.
Also, currently Chrome and Firefox support it. Currently Edge and Safari both support it in preview versions of the browsers. I am not sure where you are coming when you say "there is hardly an agreed-upon standard so far" because the four largest browser manufacturers have agreed enough to have 4 different working products or demos. Perhaps you could expand on that to let me know what you or if your information might have been old.
Although I would love to have a working model of WASM to play with, the fact is that it is a fresh idea and that any spec you see today will not be around in five years.
Wanting WASM to look like C/C++ is so hilariously misguided that I wonder if any programmers have been paying attention to language evolution in the past 5 decades.
Yes, Javascript is the best we can do at the moment, and that is truly sh. I do not disagree. My latest progress with regards to that is using something that compiles to JS, but there is still the indefatigable issue of having to use Javascript.
To me, WASM is an initiative to redesign the language behind the screen, and anything short would be inadequate because Javascript already does almost everything, just in an incredibly roundabout, piecemeal, poorly evolved way.
So, you are right in assuming I have not been paying attention to the news in the world of Web ASM, but I must also appeal to your logic and say that any of the news you read now is just theoretical debate. Maybe I should take up my issues with the language designers, as that may prove more fruitful.
