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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

Very nice and well researched article.

I'm all in on Wasm on the medium-to-long term as I think it will eventually dominate everything (embedded, mobile and web). The comparison with JS is a bit unfair as the former has had a 20+ year head start plus billions of dollars (yes, billions) in R&D to make it as performant as possible.

I think JS is a great language/platform and I consider V8 an amazing piece of engineering, it would be on my list for the seven wonders of the digital world. Wasm will get there someday and will take the place of JS, IMO.

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We use WASM today and it's not for any performance reasons. Hopefully, like you say that will become an advantage too down the road as WASM matures. But, simply, there are parts of our application which we feel much more comfortable with and we find much more manageable being implemented in Rust and compiled to WASM. So for us WASM grants portability and language choice in a first class manner (as opposed to transpiling to and from JS and all the glue that entails). It's a real shot at dismantling the browser JS hegemony.

It sounds more like Rust gave you that choice, because it would have been just as good if the rust code transpiled to JS. I’m not knocking WASM just pointing out that you’re not praising any particular qualities of WASM, but of Rust.

>It sounds more like Rust gave you that choice

Yes, but there's also a reason why the Rust -> JS route never took off.

Wasm is positioning itself as the common runtime for a lot of frontends (term borrowed from LLVM). You could see it as some sort of spiritual successor to the JVM, and it may actually accomplish the goal of "Write once, run anywhere" to a much greater extent.

(Btw, I am not criticizing Java here, I've worked with it and the JVM and other derivative languages for almost a decade and they all are quite valuable tools!)

>Yes, but there's also a reason why the Rust -> JS route never took off.

What is this reason?

> dominate everything (embedded, mobile and web)

Do you also think it will displace runtimes on the server? I'm thinking about the JVM and CLR.

I do, and it has already creeped into some platforms that provide, at least, compatibility with these runtimes, see: https://www.graalvm.org/22.1/reference-manual/wasm/

Btw, I think the GraalVM project is another amazing piece of tech with a bright future.

That just runs wasm inside graal (and thus, openjdk), so I don’t think it is an indiciation of anything, other than graal’s truly exceptional novelty of being the one vm to rule them all (referencing graal’s white paper).

IMHO it will have to, if it's ever going to dominate "web".

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