alt Hacker NewsWebAssembly itself is not that inefficient in storage. It is mostly the usual bloat that comes with binaries. For example, Go binaries have to provide a full runtime, including garbage collection.
If size is your top priority, you can produce very small binaries, for example with C. Project [0] emulates an x86 architecture, including hardware, BIOS, and DOS compatibility, and ends up with a WebAssembly size of 78 kB uncompressed and a 24 kB transfer size.
>you can produce very small binaries, for example with C
Not many people are going to want to be rolling their own libc like that author. Most people just compile their app and ship megabytes of webassembly at the expense of their users. To me webassembly is just a shortcut to ship faster because you don't have to port existing code.