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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

The desperation to make WebAssembly a thing is reaching epic proportions. It was always a cutesy little thing that no one took super seriously. A cool experiment that had little real-world application. But non-technical investors poured millions into WebAssembly startups, so we're doomed to keep seeing these posts pop up until all that money dries up. And, trust me, will it ever dry up.

Other than a few extremely niche situations (maybe browser-based gaming?) does anyone ever really think to themselves "wow I should really use WebAssembly here?" Even the post itself doesn't talk about any real solutions, just about what might be possible:

> database platforms could gain these additions with little to no incremental work required

Ultimate cope. It's the classic solution looking for a problem.

(Edit: mass downvoted by the WASMOOOORS)

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I haven't heard of startups with webassembly based products that have received millions, do you have some examples si I can look into it please?

Regarding use cases, I think there are plenty, mainly in places where you need to protect yourself against th code you're running, so pretty similar to docker, but lighter and faster boot time. Admittedly, also less feature complete and a different target: less business-y code and more system-y code.

So anything like cloud functions, database functions as described in this article, indeed web browser based games. I think Fastly is providing cloud functions at the edge that are wasm based.

With these uses cases, theoretically, an ecosystem might develop making more use cases transferable from docker to wasm, particularly use cases of isolated pieces of logic that need to be executed unitarity.

Just Google "wasm startup raises millions," like half a dozen pop up on the first page (including OP's company).

> mainly in places where you need to protect yourself against the code you're running

You can do this with LUA or like a million other languages (heck, even vanilla JS). The idea that WASM is the only sandboxed thing in the universe is just weird.

> The idea that WASM is the only sandboxed thing in the universe is just weird.

I don't know anyone who has ever said that.

I feel like WASM gets a lot of attention from devs who are like “the web sucks, because JavaScript sucks. I won’t sully myself with such a childish programming language. If there was ever a way to build web apps without JavaScript and I could use [my preferred language] then web development would instantly become a joy and I would be happy doing it”.

Those people seem to get excited at the idea that you could build web apps with a “real compiler”.

But personally I just don’t buy that JavaScript is the reason web development is hard. I think it’s just the natural outcome of the fact that the capabilities of browsers are both varied and ever changing, and therefore the expectations of clients are always changing, and therefore the tooling to be able to (relatively) quickly meet those requirements is always changing.

But we’ll see. Maybe there will be some beautiful, stable web dev framework built on WASM that comes out!

I would like to add to that web developers always makes it harder for themselves too.

99% of programmers will never directly touch WASM, but in 10 years 99% of web users will use a WASM-based runtime in their browser for daily tasks/entertainment.

WASM will eat SPAs and a chunk of the gaming market, it's just a matter of how long it takes.

> WASM will eat SPAs and a chunk of the gaming market, it's just a matter of how long it takes.

Ah yes, the classic "we're still early"—might I introduce you to cryptocurrency? Apologies for the snakiness, but if it hasn't happened in the last 10 years, do you really think it will happen in the next 10?

Can you offer a convincing explanation why large web apps ought to be built on huge interpreted JS systems (e.g. React) instead of purpose-built runtimes, especially once WASM matures in X years?

It's like implementing Photoshop in Python. Why would you do that?

> purpose-built runtimes

The lift here is astronomical, not to mention that companies just want to get a merch store up. No business person or product manager really cares about the "runtime."

But you dodged my question: do you think that a technology needs two decades to really "mature?" Go and Rust clearly solved real problems (or at least are fun to use) and we see many developers leveraging them. Even React (which I personally hate) made things easier for front-end devs. WASM adoption is virtually zero.

> not to mention that companies just want to get a merch store up

The use case is less traditional websites and more performance-demanding "apps." (And non-web uses for portal runtime.)

> The lift here is astronomical, not to mention that companies just want to get a merch store up. No business person or product manager really cares about the "runtime."

You fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of WASM for web development. It is not another web app framework or programming language. It's a platform for building frameworks/DSLs.

Of course the "business person or product manager" doesn't care about the runtime. They also don't care about 99% of the Web APIs or how React was implemented. They don't have to, because that work was done by the people working on the runtime (or reactive framework). WASM is for the latter group.

Average webdev yesterday wrote PHP/HTML and JQuery.

Average webdev today writes React DSL (e.g. TSX) for a monstrous "runtime" hacked together in JS.

Average webdev tomorrow writes Python for a reasonably fast Python interpreter implemented in the browser with WASM [1] (and maybe written in Rust).

[1] - https://pyscript.net/

> Average webdev tomorrow writes Python for a reasonably fast Python interpreter implemented in the browser with WASM

Python is just as hand-wavy as Javascript, so I fail to see the win here. At least C/C++/Rust/Go give you some neat guarantees, but you lose all the velocity JS gives you. I mean, pyscript doesn't even support hot reloading out of the box, but yeah, I'm sure it's definitely the future. Besides, you could probably just write the interpreter in vanilla JS and it would be comparably fast (at least in Chrome), so WASM is completely superfluous.

> At least C/C++/Rust/Go give you some neat guarantees

Wow, imagine if you could compile these to WASM.

> Besides, you could probably just write the interpreter in vanilla JS and it would be comparably fast (at least in Chrome), so WASM is completely superfluous.

This one is going in the orange site bookmarks, lol.

> This one is going in the orange site bookmarks, lol.

I mean, benchmarks say the performance gains are from 0.2%-60% comparing vanilla JS to WASM given various browsers (keep in mind it's not even twice as fast even in synthetic benchmarks). So I guess you're right: if I built my next todo web app, I'd definitely want to change my entire workflow, write a custom purpose-built runtime, and transpile from Python to WASM to eek out that sweet sweet performance in Google Chrome.

I don't even think we live on the same planet.

Agreed.

Cryptocurrency has significant legal, financial, political, and behavioral hurdles.

I've no idea why you think that situation is a close analog to WASM.

The top comment is also skeptical of WASM. You got downvoted because your comment has nothing interesting to say and no purpose other than to fan a flame war.

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