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I've yet to see a good reason for webassembly in the wild. Is anyone using it in production for anything substantial? We have a couple of uses of it but I'm s

I've yet to see a good reason for webassembly in the wild. Is anyone using it in production for anything substantial? We have a couple of uses of it but I'm still not convinced it was worth the trade offs and felt mor like someone was having fun with a hammer.

Klonoar 4y ago
WASM is honestly fantastic but it took me awhile to see the benefits. Figma is the usual example. Another good example I learned about recently is StackBlitz, which uses it to run Node in the browser for localhost-less dev environments.
- yesimahuman 4y ago
  One thing about wasm I’m trying to understand: isn’t the bottleneck accessing DOM, WebGL, etc through JS? You’d have to have a workload that stayed away from those operations as much as possible to truly matter performance wise, no?
  - FridgeSeal 4y ago
    A couple of years ago now, Mozilla had a blog post where they demonstrated that they could stream the DOM to a WASM blob and they could parse the stream, perform the diffs and updates to the DOM and stream it back, faster than the same operations could be completed in the JS runtime.
    - yesimahuman 4y ago
      Interesting, but round trip is that still the case (i.e. performing the diffs and then applying them on the JS/DOM side)? Either way unlocking access to Web APIs from wasm will be transformational if it ever happens.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AlchemistCamp 4y ago
Have you ever used Figma?
azemetre 4y ago
Figma uses rust heavily for their web apps utilizing web assembly. Can’t link to the exact posts but they’ve written about this on their dev blog before. I believe it’s mostly for video processing iirc.
dmix 4y ago
Here's the list of sites using Webassembly: https://madewithwebassembly.com/ https://madewithwebassembly.com/ The use-cases are all very niche stuff... some examples: > https://avocode.com/ https://avocode.com/ much like Figma (which was written in C++) it's a heavy duty web app which involved a desktop-app like experience for working with graphical files > Google Earth (obvious CPU-heavy non-traditional web stuff) > various game engines and game-related stuff > 1password uses it to "speed up their browser extension" > PDFTron... PDF annotation app, so another Figma-like usecase > some in-browser IDEs So mostly it's just a) C++ type developers who don't want to learn JS for their hobby project b) it doesn't make sense for them to migrate their existing software to JS so they 'emulate' it c) it's some heavy-duty non-web-typical use-case. I highly doubt it will ever serve a purpose beyond these niches. Which is fine... it's cool having the option but it's obviously not the first choice for any professional team targeting the web

Klonoar 4y ago

WASM is honestly fantastic but it took me awhile to see the benefits. Figma is the usual example. Another good example I learned about recently is StackBlitz, which uses it to run Node in the browser for localhost-less dev environments.

yesimahuman 4y ago
One thing about wasm I’m trying to understand: isn’t the bottleneck accessing DOM, WebGL, etc through JS? You’d have to have a workload that stayed away from those operations as much as possible to truly matter performance wise, no?
- FridgeSeal 4y ago
  A couple of years ago now, Mozilla had a blog post where they demonstrated that they could stream the DOM to a WASM blob and they could parse the stream, perform the diffs and updates to the DOM and stream it back, faster than the same operations could be completed in the JS runtime.
  - yesimahuman 4y ago
    Interesting, but round trip is that still the case (i.e. performing the diffs and then applying them on the JS/DOM side)? Either way unlocking access to Web APIs from wasm will be transformational if it ever happens.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

AlchemistCamp 4y ago

Have you ever used Figma?

azemetre 4y ago

Figma uses rust heavily for their web apps utilizing web assembly. Can’t link to the exact posts but they’ve written about this on their dev blog before. I believe it’s mostly for video processing iirc.

dmix 4y ago

Here's the list of sites using Webassembly: https://madewithwebassembly.com/ https://madewithwebassembly.com/ The use-cases are all very niche stuff... some examples: > https://avocode.com/ https://avocode.com/ much like Figma (which was written in C++) it's a heavy duty web app which involved a desktop-app like experience for working with graphical files > Google Earth (obvious CPU-heavy non-traditional web stuff) > various game engines and game-related stuff > 1password uses it to "speed up their browser extension" > PDFTron... PDF annotation app, so another Figma-like usecase > some in-browser IDEs So mostly it's just a) C++ type developers who don't want to learn JS for their hobby project b) it doesn't make sense for them to migrate their existing software to JS so they 'emulate' it c) it's some heavy-duty non-web-typical use-case. I highly doubt it will ever serve a purpose beyond these niches. Which is fine... it's cool having the option but it's obviously not the first choice for any professional team targeting the web