Hacker News Reader

Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

My only issue with WASM is that it forces me to contort my platform abstraction later to terrible web APIs. Other than that it's great. I can compile C++ with plain clang or the WASI SDK, and it runs everywhere at near native speeds with minimal boilerplate.

In my opinion, WebAssembly just needs to be better than what it replaced (asm.js) to be called a success story. And it definitely is better than asm.js.

Unlike HTML or CSS or JavaScript which are by definition large enabling technologies that enable completely new things, WASM is always that small step to make C/C++ and other native languages usable on the web. I never thought of WASM as a magic wand that makes web apps super fast and you probably shouldn’t.

>In my opinion, WebAssembly just needs to be better than what it replaced (asm.js) to be called a success story.

That would be only true if WASM was meant as a transitionary technology. But it has been with us for more than a decade, and it's only so-so. And if you think this, what do you think should replace it?

I have a couple ideas.

Is speeding up apps an aim of WebAssembly? I’m not being sarcastic… most of the slowdown you see in webapps is due to the DOM and/or network latency and WebAssembly offers nothing new there. The JavaScript language is very rarely the reason why an app is slow.

I’ve used WebAssembly to great success creating a unified codebase that runs on Node, an iOS app and on the web. It’s a niche but in that area it opens doors that were previously impossible to open.

Obviously it is, I've been writing a scientific library that runs in-browser and WebAssembly has been a blessing, it's easily 10x faster than the backend Python code it replaced, and 2-5x faster than I could achieved with JavaScript.

OP said:

> We still don't have all applications running super-fast on the web. This is a failure.

My point is that the vast majority of webapps do not rely on specific scientific libraries doing complex calculations.

You have probably run WebAssembly without noticing it, I would call that a success.

I agree. It is mostly a solution looking for a problem and has close to the same functional downsides as Flash or Applets other than "transparency".

Its 'sandbox' is also escapeable at both the engine level in V8, Gecko and JavaScriptCore (All in C/C++) and at the implementation level; especially if the software was converted from C to WASM.

So it is not the silver bullet people think it is.

[0] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2026-11645

[1] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/334120897

[2] https://trustsig.eu/blog/wasm2c-tableflip-unchecked-calloc/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com