WebAssembly is a safe, portable, low-level format designed for efficient execution and compact representation of code on modern processors including in a web browser.
At the end of 2019, W3C announced that WA has officially become the fourth language for the Web, which allows code to run in the browser.
Have you built any projects with WA and do you believe in the future potential for it?
Top comments (5)
As a tech-blogger I played around with Rust/WASM.
The idea seems promising, but we aren't there yet for everyday web apps, the overhead is too big.
The app bundles are too big, and I don't even mean that ludicrous stuff Blazor fabricates. The DOM perf isn't that good because WASM can't directly interact with it.
So what's good?
Rust has a bettet type-system than JS, and pattern matching is pretty awesome. Also, I read the perf of Rust/WASM code is more uniform, so while it's not absolutely faster at least it behaves the same even on edge cases.
But I'm just at the beginning of my WASM journey, so I might be missing stuff or getting it all wrong :D
It probably won't overtake any existing web app technologies, but I see it being a great contender as the web becomes more and more widely adopted as a standard for cross-platform experiences. Especially for proprietary apps, being able to port significant portions of an existing C (or similar) codebase into WASM and some of the benefits that come with browser (sandboxing, interoperability, etc.) — could be fantastic from many perspectives!
Not yet, But I will experiment with it.
What I realised is that until current needs can be done with current technologies, new technologies won't be used. I'm sure there must be some people experimented with it, but for it to become prevalent, there must be a feature needed that cannot be built with current things.
Just two experiments, one was for work.
The first was to process pixels from a video feed:
dev.to/fallenstedt/using-rust-and-...
And the other was a simple canvas based game which didn't turn out that well
dev.to/fallenstedt/making-a-canvas...
No.
Well, that was simple and doesn't contribute anything to the discussion....
It's one of those technologies I've heard of, but have never seen a big push from any major player to really require me to delve into it. When I first heard of it, I was having a break from development in my career, but working in a .NET development house. Some of the senior guys there had mentioned it, and what it could bring. I just assumed it was more a .NET focused tech. Not my stack, never looked into it from there.
There's other things I want to learn ahead of that. Stuff which would bring real benefit to the projects I am working on, and ones I have in the pipeline down the road. Without looking into it properly, I still don't see a need to learn it.