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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

So is WASM basically just going to be about video games? And graphics rendering?

If only.

I wondered as I clicked, "why would someone want a limited application set for WASM? Wouldn't it be better if more—Oh yes, I see."

Yeah WebAssembly enables casual gamers, gamers on Macs (especially on newer M1/M2 devices with limited game compatibility natively) and students on Chromebooks to jump into a game in a low friction manner. And this isn't even mentioning being able to reach mobile devices, which represents the largest portion of revenue in the games industry today.

Couple this with the fact that developers won't have to pay a 30% fee for distribution on the web, and you have the recipe for the next big games platform that's hardware agnostic by default. Very disruptive stuff.

Mac users already have Rosetta, they don't need any limited gaming platform. And Chromebooks have native Android and Linux compatibility (plus Wine and Steam), so the WASM gaming would be useless for them compared to native GL/Vulkan rendering thru MESA under ChromeOS.

I used emscripten to make physics and math software written in Fortran available to my JavaScript program. I would've used wasm, but it was in poor shape back when I wrote the software. There are a lot of things besides games and graphics written in C/C++ that can be used in JavaScript as a result of emscripten and wasm.

Speaking as someone working on a webassembly port of a non-video game software for a living: yeah maybe.

It's certainly the use-case that received the most love.

I used an emscripten app that dumped vtables from Linux .so files - I thought that was much easier than having to download something.

Well, that would be great, yeah. But the other web APIs (everything except WASM, WebGL and WebGPU) still have a long way to go to provide the same functionality as native APIs that are relevant for gaming. Currently the web equivalents are a massive PITA to work with. The web platform needs something like the DirectX or Proton initiatives to make it viable for games, WASM and WebGPU alone are not enough.

I have no idea why this is getting downvoted. Floh is, among other things, the author of Sokol, which is a set of cross platform libs suitable for game dev. Sokol has "native" support for the web, which means you can write your app against Sokol and don't have to deal directly with these painful web APIs.

I've personally used Sokol for a number of projects and it has been great. You get something much leaner and meaner compared to the Emscripten port of SDL, which otherwise seems to be the "default" when people do these things.

https://github.com/floooh/sokol

WASD + WASM = <3

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