WebAssembly makes it possible to:
* Run x86 binaries in the browser via JIT-ting (https://webvm.io)
* Run Java applications in the browser, including Minecraft (https://browsercraft.cheerpj.com)
* Run node.js containers in the browser (https://browserpod.io)
It's an incredibly powerful tool, but very much a power-user one. Expecting your average front-end logic to be compiled in WebAssembly does not make much sense.
Why not? .NET Blazor and others already do that. In my eyes this was the whole hype of WASM. Replace JS. I don't give a crap about running node/java/whatever in the browser, why would i want that? I can run those outside the browser. I mean sure if you have some use case for it that's fine and I'm glad WASM lets you do it but I really don't see why most devs would care about that. We use the browser for browsing the web and displaying our websites.
To me the browser is for displaying websites and I make websites but I loathe JS. So being able to make websites without JS is awesome.
Not every language is a good source for targeting WASM, in the sense that you don't want to bring a whole standard library, custom runtime etc with you.
High-level languages may fare better if their GC is compatible with Wasm's GC model, though, as in that case the resulting binaries could be quite small. I believe Java-to-wasm binaries can be quite lean for that reason.
In c#'s case, it's probably mostly blazor's implementation, but it's not a good fit in this form for every kind of website (but very nice for e.g. an internal admin site and the like)
Modern Blazor can do server side rendering for SEO/crawlers and fast first load similar to next.js, and seamlessly transition to client side rendering or interactive server side rendering afterwards.
Your info/opinion may be based on earlier iterations of Blazor.
> we are at 2MB compressed with https://minfx.ai
What is this 2 MB for? It would be interesting to hear about your WebAssembly performance story!
Regarding the website homepage itself: it weighs around 767.32 kB uncompressed in my testing, most of which is an unoptimized 200+kB JPEG file and some insanely large web fonts (which honestly are unnecessary, the website looks _pretty good_ and could load much faster without them).
Additionally Blazor is a bad fit for .NET CMS and commerce platforms, none of them supports it for rendering components.
It's pretty impressive how far along CheerpJ is right now. I kinda wish this existed about five or ten years ago with this level of performance, maybe it would've allowed some things in the web platform to pan out differently.
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