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Comment by martin_drapeau | Hacker News Reader

Can someone point out a known web page/service that uses WebAssembly?

Figma is probably the biggest web application that uses it for the main feature they offer (the entire in-browser editor is C++ compiled to Wasm).

You can read more about how they use it here: https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

> Because our product is written in C++, which can easily be compiled into WebAssembly, Figma is a perfect demonstration of this new format’s power. If you haven’t used Figma before, it’s a browser-based interface design tool with a powerful 2D WebGL rendering engine that supports very large documents.

Ok, this is a great example. I will check that out!

Mozilla uses WebAssembly in it's offline translation extension. Here's a web-page demonstrating the same stuff:

- https://mozilla.github.io/translate/

These are neural models that are compressed and optimized to run on user's CPU. I write some of the code which repurposes the underlying (C++) library for extension's needs, all of which gets compiled via emscripten to WebAssembly for use in the browser.

Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31596888

Whenever you use Zoom or Meet in a browser you're using WebAssembly. Lots of other sites do too, but you just need to open the devtools to notice it.

Other big examples: Unity games, Photoshop, Figma, Google Earth, etc.

Unreal Engine games on the web soon as well :)

https://venturebeat.com/2022/05/12/wonder-interactives-the-i...

Google Meet uses it for a bunch of processing.

Figma uses it.

We're using it right now to drive a new physics integration.

Just curious what your thought are regarding this (https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html) if you have seen it. Does implementing a physics engine in Rust and complied in wasm provide you guys with quite a big performance boost? Asking because I've considered doing so for my team, but have reservations about the performance increase.

We’re not implementing in Rust but taking an existing piece of middleware (Bullet) and using it. Performance wise it’d be an apples to oranges comparison but our general understanding from benchmarks, our own personal experiments and blogs like the one you posted there is not to expect miracles but more consistency and less footguns (e.g. megamorphic behaviour).

This is another good summary: https://ianjk.com/webassembly-vs-javascript/

I would say there is hope when SIMD is supported across major browsers if your workload will make use of it. Just waiting on Safari. And there might well be more performance to eek out of the JIT compilation.

Thanks! This was useful

You can run Python directly in the browser via Pyodide: https://pyodide.org/en/stable/

well, I have just implemented webgpu support for Pyodide ;). Soon, we will able to train neural nets right in the browser :). So, right now I'm working a very minimal grad based nn framework

How do I know it's running in the browser?

Adobe Photoshop and Autodesk for example.

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