Is speeding up apps an aim of WebAssembly? I’m not being sarcastic… most of the slowdown you see in webapps is due to the DOM and/or network latency and WebAssembly offers nothing new there. The JavaScript language is very rarely the reason why an app is slow.
I’ve used WebAssembly to great success creating a unified codebase that runs on Node, an iOS app and on the web. It’s a niche but in that area it opens doors that were previously impossible to open.
Obviously it is, I've been writing a scientific library that runs in-browser and WebAssembly has been a blessing, it's easily 10x faster than the backend Python code it replaced, and 2-5x faster than I could achieved with JavaScript.