So, to clarify, "WEBassembly" was a terrible name in retrospect -- the majority of WASM use (that I have encountered) is serverside, not clientside. The super

So, to clarify, "WEBassembly" was a terrible name in retrospect -- the majority of WASM use (that I have encountered) is serverside, not clientside. The super tl;dr of WASM is that it's a universal bytecode format, an idea sort of like the JVM or the CLR. There are a few major benefits to this: 1. Languages can pick WASM as a compile target, and then run anywhere that WASM is supported. This includes the browser, the server, embedded devices, wherever. 2. WASM acts as a "Lingua Franca" for interop between languages, sort of like a C ABI. Any language that supports importing WASM bundles immediately gains support for calling code from any language that supports compiling to WASM. It's trivial to write a program that calls functions from IE. Rust, Go, Zig, and C# in the span of 10 lines, because of WASM. On the clientside, you still need JS because WASM needs to interact with the browser's DOM API's. I'm not convinced of the benefits of WASM for writing web apps. (One exception is maybe Blazor for .NET, which is exceptionally well-done)