WASM 3.0 just published in September includes garbage collection, and the upcoming WASM 4.0 will include support for true threading. Those are pretty key features for widespread adoption.

What happened to it!? It’s a new technology in the early stages of adoption. A little patience…

This makes questions like “how fast is WebAssembly” a bit hard to answer. […] What people actually mean is “how useful are the constructs of this language to efficient mappings of modern hardware” and “what is the current landscape of systems taking advantage of these constructs”.

For many of these, WebAssembly is critical to either their entire product or a major feature.

But I think this alone is not very convincing. We don’t yet see major websites entirely built with webassembly-based frameworks.

Why should it be necessary to build things only in wasm for the web? JS is a really good language for building frontends. There is a reason why lots of companies prefer building native applications with React. People always complain about framework bloat with JS, but then we want to hype up shipping huge wasm binaries? Just for basic interaction in a UI?

Wasm is doing great, inside and outside the browser. But it won’t replace JS because there’s no reason to do so.

I played around for a while with Blazor (C# Web assembly) and wasn’t a massive fan.

The debugging experience was awful.

Lots of runtime gotchas, it’s limited to one thread, so anything that creates a thread will fail at runtime (but not ‘normal’ async stuff). What code creates a thread? No idea until it fails at runtime.

Yes, you can share a dto project between front end and backend, but anything else will eventually trip you up.

It’s still a cool idea though, will try it again at some point.

It is used where it is applicable. For regular web pages it is overkill that only complicates everything with no gain at all.

It seems to just be more attack surface for very little actual gain on JS. At least with JS I have NoScript, Ublock and some actual say over what loads/runs on my box. For this reason, I usually just disable all wasm/webgl/webrtc until I find out that I actually need it which for me is basically never or only for very short periods.