alt Hacker NewsWASM first appeared in 2017.
It still hasn't really reached a breakthrough.
Billions use HTML+CSS+JavaScript. Who really uses WASM? There are of course users, but very, very few in absolute numbers. Many projects are not web-based really. For Autodesk Fusion, as one example for many, I have some mega-slow application that takes forever to work with in some cases on my laptop (it is not the fastest laptop, but I recently tested this on a faster desktop computer with 32GB RAM and it is still slow to no ends; using it all WASM based would be even slower I bet. That's not winning anyone over ...).
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When I last played with it checking out its capabilities, I found the thing I was mostly missing to really make use of it was the thing referenced in this article, the Component Model. Without a type model and binary specifications, interop was made a lot harder than it'd have been otherwise. Now that that's in, it becomes a lot more useful.
I was mostly looking at it for its state as being a cross-platform supported output platform of bytecode that's fairly well sandboxed. That makes it an excellent target for things like running untrusted plugins in an application in a performant manner.
WASM made Figma.
I wrote an Unreal file parser in C# and use it in our in-house web based DAM. It was much more ergonomic and performant than writing it in Javascript.
WASM is super useful for FFI in some env
According to https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity... WebAssembly runs on about 6.11% of Chrome page loads, up from 3.37% in January 2024.