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apignotti | 1 month ago

We use WebAssembly aggressively at Leaning Technologies across our tools.

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.

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sfn42|1 month ago

> 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.

gf000|1 month ago

Because people don't want to load 300MB for a simple website (and this is blocking the first render, not just loading in the background).

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)

pjmlp|1 month ago

It does, but honestly besides people missing out on WebForms and Silverlight, it has very little uptake.

doodlesdev|1 month ago

Any reason why browsercraft doesn't work in Firefox? Ended up opening it in Brave and had a lot of fun hahaha

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.