I judge things by how they affect me right now. Right now it is not a big deal. As a web developer I haven’t had a need for it and don’t anticipate a need for it any time in the near future. If I need to use it at some point in the future, maybe it will be a big deal.
"If it's not a big deal now it's not a big deal now, and if it's a big deal in the future then it will be a big deal in the future" is not adding as much to the conversation as you think it is.
The point of HN is in large part about thinking about the future and not just look about how things are just "right now". There is no point discussing the impact that things have right now, we can just measure it.
But it’s not new. It’s been around for years. And I’m not really aware of any real uses on the web.
Other people in these comments have mentioned using it as an extension mechanism to other applications. That’s nice.
But what browsers use it internally? What popular JS/TS libraries? What big websites?
It seems Figma does, but I had to Google to find that.
It’s an interesting idea, but it feels a bit like VRML or something else so far. “It’s going to take off, just give it time.”
Some things will. Some won’t. But WASM doesn’t seem to provide enough above JS to overcome the “we can just use JS” hurdle for the vast majority of uses so far.
It's not what you need, it's what you want but just don't know it yet. Use Rust/WASM and you get a superior package manager in Cargo. Rust gets you a solid type system that's built in instead of an add-on like TypeScript or Flow, and there is no need for a complicated build pipeline with Babel and WebPack, just a single compile target. Overall, I find working with Rust/WASM to be a better developer experience the working with the NPM/Js ecosystem.
Web (site) developers will likely never have to learn Wasm if they don’t want to. But people are increase shipping regular application software to the browser as if it’s an OS. Technically you could say the developers of these apps are “web developers”, but the stack is increasingly diverging from the stack a web (site) developer would need to care about: Wasm, WebGPU, OPFS, etc.
