[vcarl]

Web assembly is generally an optimization, not an app alternative. Think of it the way you would the C bindings Node.js has. If you've got a compute-heavy code path, writing it in C (or Rust etc) and shipping it as web assembly could be a dramatic perf improvement, but there's not really a substantive benefit to writing your entire app with it.

[asdkhadsj]

> but there's not really a substantive benefit to writing your entire app with it.

Amendment: Perhaps it's debatable what "substantive benefit" would be, but writing the whole app in it is a huge benefit if you really want to do that. That is to say, for years people wanted to write Web UI stuff in various languages, this also allows for that.

So while the concrete performance boost may not be meaningful in writing an entire web app in C, Rust, Go, Python or w/e - to the developer happiness the boost may be huge for those devs that want it.

[vcarl]

Well, you still can't do that—WASM doesn't have DOM bindings, you'd still have to ship out to JS. I believe that's a goal, so yes eventually that could be a benefit, but not at the moment.

[opencl]

Another benefit is initial page load times, if your page has a lot of JS it can take a pretty significant amount of time to parse it.

i.e. Figma said it reduced page load times by a factor of 3, though they were using WASM to replace existing asm.js code.

https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

[petters]

Another benefit I suppose is that you can choose from many more languages. Whether that is substantive or not depends on the person, I guess.

[weberc2]

That's a use case, but there are many others, as the article mentions, like lightweight isolation for server side apps or writing your frontend app in a different language (not pragmatic today, but could be in the future).