[rubbingalcohol]

But arguably Webassembly is also dumb and has no reason to exist, so there's that on top of it being a great way to obfuscate malicious code.

[chrysoprace]

Saying that WASM has no reason to exist is going a bit far. Rather than trying to list the reasons, I'm going to refer to the official FAQ: https://webassembly.org/docs/use-cases/

> Better execution for languages and toolkits that are currently cross-compiled to the Web (C/C++, GWT, …).

> Image / video editing.

> Games

> Peer-to-peer applications

> ...

In my view it's trying to create a safe sandbox for things that we previously used unsafe sandboxes (Flash, Java, Silverlight etc.) for. A standard interface for all of these will be much better for everyone.

[Pigo]

Running Unreal Engine in the browser, in any browser, is pretty cool. I think there's going to be a lot of interesting use cases for it.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Cool? Maybe if one fetishizes overengineering and abstraction layers.

[saagarjha]

I suggest you take a look at actually obfuscated JavaScript; it's barely any better than WebAssembly.

[TomMarius]

Calling Webassembly dumb is really dumb. Look at their github repos and consider how much very cleverly done work is there.

Calling it useless in a world where most people are running JS is also weird, but that's more subjective.