> I'm a bit lost on the appeal of webassembly A clue lies in the fact that all the major browser vendors (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple) are implementing W

> I'm a bit lost on the appeal of webassembly A clue lies in the fact that all the major browser vendors (Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple) are implementing WebAssembly. What is the strategic reason for this? The speculation is that it all has to do with the rise of native mobile apps, which posed a threat to the web-entrenched interests. Google, I'm guessing, would prefer that you to stay in the web browser, using Google Search to to find all your applications, running them Google Chrome, and remaining a captive audience for Google's advertising clients. (instead of are searching for apps in the App Store and running them natively). One important reason that native apps initially took off was that games, and other interactive content, could not be efficiently implemented for mobile web browsers. WebAssembly (in combination with WebGL) pretty much solves this problem. People have already ported a number of C++.OpenGL games to the web using emscripten. > I, and everyone else I know, has little to no interest writing C/C++/Rust in the browser I understand that most 3D game development is done in C++. I'm guessing that you don't know a lot of 3D game developers? Besides games, many professional applications are developed in C++, for a variety of reasons. Examples could include scientific, engineering, graphics and audio processing software. > Most of the people I know want to write Java/Python/Ruby/Elixir/Scala/C#/Clojure in the browser Python is an interpreted language and CPython is implemented in C. You can cross-compile to WebAssembly today and start running Python scripts in the browser. Performance critical paths in Python scripts, like NumPy operations, which are offloaded to compiled C functions, would be offloaded to compiled WASM functions. As for garbage collected languages, like Java and C#, future versions of WebAssembly will provide low-level GC primitives, which should theoretically allow those languages to run in the web browser as well. Having said that, you would incur the overhead of having to run the JVM/CLR virtual machine inside the browser engines's own JavaScript/WebAssembly virtual machine. > I'd love to hear some of you guys talk about what uses you have for Webassembly and what exciting things it will let you do. I suspect there is a lot of interest from C/C++/Rust developers already, and will continue to grow as WASM matures. Something like 10 million professional developers know and use C++ regularly, so this is a not insignificant usergroup on its own.