I see it mostly with what I would call “industrial applications”: video editing, CAD, etc. Besides games, consumer software tends not to be computationally intensive, so there are few consumer examples (which I think leads to a sort of “JavaScript is fast enough for everything” fallacy among web devs)
I happen to write a newsletter where I interview this sort of company, here are some recent examples that use Wasm:
Webdevs seem to have a blind spot around UI. Plenty of end-user apps - like music players - and websites - like e-commerce stores - tend to have compute-intensive UIs. They may not look compute-intensive for a dev on a beefy machine, playing with mockups and toy loads, but they absolutely become noticeable compute hogs on real machines with real loads.
And by "real loads" I really mean just more than two dozen items on a list of whatever it is the app displays.
My company has several tables in our UI whose API endpoints simply query for all records in that table without pagination. hundreds of rows are loaded into a table plugin, even if you'll never get past the first page
That's... good. Hundreds of rows is a trivial amount, so unless they're expensive to generate on the backend and/or meaningfully large, it should be a non-issue. The question is, what is the page size in the UI, and why is it less than "hundreds of rows"?
Browsers can handle hundreds of rows just fine, even on, say, a modest Chromebook. No problem. If you're looking for someone to blame, you need to blame the crummy UI frameworks in use on the site and the half-rate developers who chose not to vet (and veto) their use. And blame the screwy job requirements and hiring practices at the company that insisted that those developers—the ones who took this development approach and worked with this kind of tech—were the right ones to hire and others were the wrong ones.
Of course. I'm definitely not blaming browsers for this - we're talking about trivial requirements here, while browsers themselves are absurdly well-optimized these days. Which makes it even harder to watch the webdevs casually throw that all away using crummy tools, too focused on moving fast themselves to give a damn about letting users move fast too.
I happen to write a newsletter where I interview this sort of company, here are some recent examples that use Wasm:
- Rayon (CAD): https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-ho...
- Modyfi (raster image editing): https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-ho...