I’ve been reading these articles for years, but I’ve yet to experience any practical use of webassembly outside of contrived demos. Where do people use all this stuff? Does anyone use it?
WebAssembly sits in the background quietly powering the web-based versions of products like Adobe Photoshop, AutoCAD, Figma, Canva, and likely others. By using Wasm components combined with other browser technologies such as HTML canvas and webGL, app performance and responsiveness can be improved.
WebAssembly also powers the Pyodide and webR projects, enabling Python and R code to run in a browser without a supporting computational server. Where I’ve seen this used most effectively so far is in teaching materials, particularly for teaching data science, where interactive R and Python examples can be embedded directly into teaching materials without the educator having to worry about the time or expense to deploy a powerful backend service to evaluate learner’s code.
https://docs.r-wasm.org/webr/latest/ https://github.com/jupyterlite/jupyterlite https://dev.lfortran.org/
There are rough edges to be sure, but the potential is great in education I think.
When you use something like the Video element on the Web then it's obvious - you see a video playing - but wasm is just a technical detail that you might not notice as a user. But it often makes things faster or easier to port or to develop, and it is used quite widely (though far less widely than JavaScript, for example).