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0 pointsazakai1y ago0 comments

> Where is WASM in the browser really used apart from crypto miners?

Art and design: Photoshop, Figma

Games: Unity, many other engines or components inside engines (e.g. Bullet)

Videoconferencing: Zoom, Google Meet, etc.

Productivity: Google Sheets

Other: Google Maps and many, many more. For example, here is a talk about how Google uses wasm in a large range of its products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2En8cj6xlv4

Look, wasm is a supplementary technology, used where JavaScript isn't good enough, like all the examples I just gave. Those use cases work extremely well right now, and most users on the web benefit from wasm, even if they are unaware wasm is running on the page - which is how it should be.

That is exactly the success that wasm aimed for from the start.

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weinzierl1y ago

People have made that same argument about Java applets 25 years ago and we all know how that panned out.

I see your point and I see and love the advantages of WASM but I doubt they will be enough to outweigh the burden to support two ecosystems in the long run. Support in the browser, as well as on the development side.

"That is exactly the success that wasm aimed for from the start."

If this is true WASM has been doomed from the start. If WASM doesn't set out to eat JavaScript's cake it will be left with the crumbs and slowly but surely starve to death.

azakaiOP1y ago

The difference with Java applets from back then is that wasm was designed by web browsers in order to work well in them.

Java applets were plugins, which led to security issues, and worse, security issues not under the control of the browser. Wasm is a proper part of the browser.

Java applets had limited interop with JavaScript and HTML. Wasm is also somewhat limited there, but it was designed to at least have fast calls to JavaScript itself.

Java also has language-specific issues. Most native code that people want to run on the web is not written in Java or another JVM language. Wasm was designed to support compilation from C++, Rust, etc. (and it has recently added Java support too).

colonial1y ago

WASM is also great for enabling web apps to locally perform tasks that would be compute/bandwidth intensive if foisted upon the server.

E.x. the Cobalt video downloader has an experimental on-device video remuxing feature that uses FFmpeg (libav) compiled to WASM. It's a win-win for both the provider (who saves on hosting and bandwidth fees) and the user (who enjoys snappier functionality and enhanced privacy guarantees.)

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