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0 pointsazakai4y ago0 comments

Small note on this:

> What this article is highlighting is that Wasm is still an immature technology.

I assume you meant on the server, where wasm is fairly new, that's true. On the browser, wasm is a mature and stable part of the Web platform.

Otherwise very good points!

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kentonv4y ago

I don't, actually. Wasm is immature in the browser, too, for the same reasons. Writing a client-side web app entirely in Wasm generally doesn't work well today because you'll force the client to download much more code before the page can run. Lots of work is being done to improve this, like adding built-in garbage collection to the Wasm runtime so that apps written in GC'd languages don't need to ship their own. Dynamic linking will help too, assuming that language runtimes are allowed to be cached across different sites.

In both environments there are certainly use cases where Wasm provides huge advantages. But those use cases are still narrow. Over time it'll grow but there's still tons of work to do.

azakaiOP4y ago

Ah, I think we disagree on the goals of wasm.

Yes, if you want to write a client-side webapp you run into limitations. That wasn't one of our main goals when we created wasm, though! It would be great if that materializes - more options are always good - but JavaScript is frankly the right tool for 99% of sites and we never intended wasm to directly compete with JS there.

Wasm is stable and mature for solving the needs of sites like Google Earth, Unity games, Figma, Meet, Zoom, etc. Those require more than what JS can offer and wasm is the perfect fit for the relevant parts of them.

On those websites wasm is often the difference between shipping and not shipping. That's a huge deal, and why wasm has been focused there. Other use cases like replacing JS with wasm might offer some benefits in speed, perhaps, but the impact of that would be smaller (but it could eventually apply to a wider set of sites, potentially).

kentonv4y ago

Right. Same for server. You can do most of what you want to do in JavaScript and it'll be fine. Use Wasm to fill in the gaps where JavaScript doesn't work. That's a good strategy today with Cloudflare Workers, too.

It's when people want to write entire apps entirely in their language of choice, and want to accomplish this using Wasm, that the technology is still missing things. A lot of people want to do this, both on the browser side and the server side.

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kentonv4y ago

In both environments there are certainly use cases where Wasm provides huge advantages. But those use cases are still narrow. Over time it'll grow but there's still tons of work to do.

azakaiOP4y ago

Ah, I think we disagree on the goals of wasm.

kentonv4y ago

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