>Putting it all together, to load Pyodide in your browser, you need to download:
>The compiled Python interpreter as WebAssembly.
>A bunch of JavaScript provided by emscripten that provides the system emulation.
>A packaged file system containing all the files the Python interpreter will need, most notably the Python standard library.
>These files can be quite large: Python itself is 21MB, NumPy is 7MB, and so on. Fortunately, these packages only have to be downloaded once, after which they are stored in the browser's cache.
Of course Mozilla didn't add Python as a supported scripting language to Firefox, nor did they create an interface to allow separate scripting languages. That would make too much sense. Instead, there's some bullshit about needing a 21 MB interpreter and a "bunch of JavaScript" and a fake filesystem.
There's no reason a browser couldn't support different scripting languages and combine JavaScript, Python, Lisp, Perl, Ruby, Lua, and so on into one page and share the GC and variables as much as possible. That's how it would work on a Lisp machine.
The UNIX way forces every program to handle everything. The browser has to have the capabilities of an OS and handle everything itself because UNIX sucks. Some browsers even have their own video codecs instead of automatically supporting whatever is installed on the OS. Going further, there's WebUSB and having to write a garbage collector to run in a browser that already has a garbage collector. WebUSB sucks because web apps become dependent on the entire USB spec as well as tens of millions of lines for a browser. Now instead of drivers that provide an abstract interface for different kinds of physical hardware based on their purpose (like printers), hardware companies will be forced to be compatible on the hardware level because UNIX weenies used their interface directly. It's like SoundBlaster compatibility on DOS all over again, but worse. It goes against the whole purpose of having drivers.
This is the same anti-modular bullshit over and over again. This anti-modularity goes to the very core of UNIX with C, fork, and pretending that all devices are either typewriters or tape drives. If these web browsers were developed on any OS other than UNIX, scripting would be modular. Look at all the languages supported by Internet Explorer automatically via WSH. Why do these bloated browsers with 100 MB libraries have a worse design than 90s Internet Explorer (or 80s Lisp machines or 60s Multics)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Script_Host
Once one strips away the cryptology, the issue is control.
UNIX is an operating system that offers the promise of
ultimate user control (ie: no OS engineer's going to take
<feature> away from ME!), which was a good thing in its
infancy, less good now, where the idiom has caused huge
redundancies between software packages. How many B*Tree
packages do we NEED? I think that I learned factoring in
high school; and that certain file idioms are agreed to in
the industry as Good Ideas. So why not support certain
common denominators in the OS?
Just because you CAN do something in user programs does not
mean it's a terribly good idea to enforce it as policy. If
society ran the same way UNIX does, everyone who owned a car
would be forced to refine their own gasoline from barrels of
crude...