Any good example projects already using WebAssembly ? Some list with multiple examples would be nice.
Someone is porting TypeScript to WASM, named AssemblyScript.
It won't surprise me to see a WebAssembly backend for Flash.
If Adobe was smart, they'd have started working on am asmjs (later WebAssembly) + webgl output for Flash a long time ago.
Alas they're not exactly forward-planning and let the platform die, and its tools fizzle. Today there's already better alternatives that do things more cleanly/natively (like Pixijs). If you use TypeScript with Pixijs, it's like having a much more advanced ActionScript, better development tools (your browser's devtools), and better performance. You lose a "stage" for free drawing, but that was more often than not a misused feature anyway (and one that has good alternatives in the DOM/JS world anyway).
And for a while they even had a C/C++ compiler for the Flash VM.
So if they really cared, it isn't something that should be too hard for them.
Failing that, it might be an interesting project for a compiler hacker without ideas.
In any case, I see it more like preserving many of the games written in Flash.
I am completely fine with asm.js.
Though WebASM is a like a wet dream for big corp with mass of legacy code in C++. We will see Office running on WebASM and other closed binary blobs in near future. It's very contrary to the concept of the open web - do you want to live in AOL-land again, were everything is closed off? No? Anyway great you helped them. I fear WebASM has several downsides that will harm young startups a lot in near future - only unicorns and big corps will benefit, it will be a win-win, less competition, because of harder entry to market, and they can ship their decades old C++ blobs as a service. It's time to wake up, and stop WebASM or severe limit it's functionality. Where is Mozilla foundation? Or is the new Mozilla just another startup, backed 90% by Google money.
I can see how C/C++ (and, well, more likely Rust) will become a de-facto solution for when you need performance or some type of robustness to your apps (ie probably the right thing for Figma). But the potential performance improvement might be negligible on most makes, and unlikely to offset the fact that you'd be working off a completely different stack making things like debugging and inspecting much harder.
What I think is likely is that using WebAssembly will allow new types of web apps to become popular. Things like video encoders, image editors, etc. Things that you just wouldn't do with JS anyway, at least not in the heavy parts. Thing of a standard web app that uses ffmpeg on the background.
But in 2017 startup and companies are starting to understand how fast response times (on a website/web-app) are of critical importance for gaining a good user base.
A C solution might make the former faster, but it'd still be a dumb architecture. A cheaper solution than migrating your whole codebase to a separate language and build process is knowing how to deal with events and how to parallelize (or delegate) stuff correctly.
Not only you but many, many programmers out there in other languages, wishing for more performance, or for a higher level of abstraction. I will brace myself for the amazing applications that will be built now for the web.
Don't count this out; there opens up the opportunity for creating new, good looking toolkits that are faster to use than coping with html + css' limitations.