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Comment by nomilk | Hacker News Reader

Is it correct that WASM probably won't affect most CRUD apps, since most don't need significant client-side compute or graphics resources?

But that WASM might enable intensive applications (e.g. cutting edge games, or 3D rendering software like an architect might use) to run in the browser, rather than on the OS, thus enabling developers of that software to make much more frequent updates (just like any web application)?

What would this mean for page load times (e.g. surely not a 700MB program downloading when the user visits a URL..?.. or.. can it?)

(apologise for the newbie questions)

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WASM probably won't affect most websites today, correct.

WASM probably won't enable cutting edge games. It has been around for years and there's no interest from the gaming community there, the newest additions to WASM like GC won't affect games much. There are other issues with the web platform that prevent this from working, e.g. the implicitly managed disk cache, the relatively old graphics APIs exposed into the sandbox, the performance impact of sandboxing, and a few other things. The games world has Steam and consoles, that seems to be good enough for them.

There might be some attempts to port desktop productivity software to the web using WASM, probably in partnership with Google, like what an architect might use. But probably not. Installing software isn't hard and pro grade software isn't an impulse buy. How much incremental revenue would a web port bring relative to the cost? Probably not much.

700mb programs downloading when a user visits a URL isn't necessarily a problem if that download actually sticks, but see caching issues above. After all, people routinely download programs that large. Chrome itself is ~500mb on disk!

WASM is not just a browser technology, it can be (and is heavily) used for edge and servers.

I can write code once and run on many runtimes across many different programming languages.

I think the server use-cases are actually more compelling than the browser use-cases.

For example, Fastly's edge compute supports running WASM code at the edge. Similar to lambda, but in the language of your choice and with great sandboxing qualities baked in.

WASM had some neat/gross implications for blackbox CRUD apps without having to show source. Some people might even start embedding secrets in web source code again!

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