alt Hacker NewsI think you're understating the cost of having to ship your own standard library with every wasm application - the chunk of stdlib used by a real app is bigger than 10kb. ICU data files are in the tens of megabytes, TZDB is a chunk of data too.
Lots of people pretend they don't need ICU or TZDB but that means leaving non-english-speakers or people outside of the US in the cold without support, which isn't the case for JS applications.
I still think this is a major unsolved problem for WebAssembly and I've previously raised it. I understand why it's not solved though - specifying and freezing the bitstream for ICU databases is a big task, etc.
A lot of the stuff WebAssembly is obviously good at is stuff where you never need any of those tables—algorithms, computations, not UI stuff. I would like to see improvements like you to make it more generally useful, but there’s still plenty of scope for WASM even without running into these issues. Also I think you’re probably overestimating the size of the stuff you actually need to include. You tend to include specific tables rather than all the data. More typical figures are like “oh, you used regex with its default features… that’ll cost 500 kB”. And that’ll also be a pre-compression 500 kB. Though on the other hand you can also end up including multiple copies of things when you’re careful about optimising what each one has!