I'm confused about the Webassembly System Interface, and what it will be able to do without a browser.
Would it make sense to write a text editor using the WASI runtime? In other words, would it render text efficiently on the CPU, or would it require a GPU (Vulkan) for that?
Do you think it would ever be able to do what the browser does: render HTML, DOM manipulation?
I understand that both Webassembly and WASI are a work in progress, but what are the future goals of the project and what applications would you be able to write for it without using any web technologies that require a browser runtime?
Currently WASI only specs a small subset of possible system interfaces, but there are proposals to things like GPU support. See:
https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/53 https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/issues/174
I don't there are any bounds on what might one day be part of WASI (assuming such additions conform to the style/conventions of WASI APIs), but I imagine it will be quite a while before you start seeing full fledged desktop applications written purely against WASI syscalls.