Ask HN: Thoughts on WebAssembly's future? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Thoughts on WebAssembly's future?

3 pointsendorphine2 comments

Theoretically speaking, the premise of WebAssembly being a common compilation target for the web (and not only), letting people write apps running at edge, in whatever language they prefer (sorta), sounds very appealing. I mean, why limit the web to JS?

However, I wanted to hear the case against wasm, if any. Do you think it will continue to gain traction and wide adoption?

Do you think it's worth dedicating time to study it's inner workings and perhaps pursue a related job?

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> However, I wanted to hear the case against wasm, if any.

FWIW, i don't believe there is a killer case against wasm. Yes, it has some rough corners and things to work out, but it's otherwise a godsend and what's currently there works exceptionally well.

Wasm breathes new life into programming languages which have historically been excluded from taking part in modern web apps. C, for example, is now a viable language for the web, meaning not that web developers need to learn C, but that dedicated C developers now know how to write certain categories of web components (even if they don't know that they know that).

> Do you think it's worth dedicating time to study it's inner workings and perhaps pursue a related job?

i won't opine on that except to stay that wasm is not going anywhere in the mid-term future and knowing a bit about it certainly can't hurt.

Understand the businesses case.

WASM is a modern Flash replacement. Flash was successful because it solved many technical problems the more primitive web technologies could not. JS can do just about everything now as fast as can be imagined so if WASM is to be successful it must solve a wildly different technology problem.

Bottom line: WASM needs to be a thing people commonly desire for outside the browser. If WASM can do that it will be just as successful inside the browser. If not nobody will care except developers sad about JavaScript, and sufficient adoption will fail because sad about JavaScript is not a qualified business case.

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