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I don't think Webassembly will ever replace Javascript in the browser. Javascript has a low barrier of entry and if you are creating React/Angular sites there's
by tiew9Vii 5y ago
I don't think Webassembly will ever replace Javascript in the browser. Javascript has a low barrier of entry and if you are creating React/Angular sites there's little to gain from Webassembly for someone not interested in safer languages.
Saying that I am really interested in Webassembly and think the word web in Webassembly does it a disservice.
I have started to think of Webassembly as a light weight JVM. It's heavy sandboxing makes it really interesting as an evolution to FaaS (Function as a service) such as AWS Lambda. Lucet which Fastly is using for their Compute@Edge reports 35 micro second code start time! I can't wait until Fasly put there Compute@Edge on general release so I can try it. I've been playing with Cloudflare workers and as they us Chrome to run WASM files you have to mess about writing Javascript shims so a bit rough around the edges debugging.
Webassembly should realise the original goals of serverless providing a cross platform runtime with security guarantees and be fast and lightweight.
Most people package an entire OS in Docker containers, with WASM they get a small cross platform artifact. This project already looks like a way to run them in K8s https://github.com/deislabs/krustlet https://github.com/deislabs/krustlet.
It also looks great for cross platform media devices. Have the bulk of your code as a WASM binary and then have very thin platform specific shim the WASM interacts with.