I think that network effects win over technical merit every time, and this time WebAssembly has the momentum. I think it's pretty neat that you can take a web

I think that network effects win over technical merit every time, and this time WebAssembly has the momentum. I think it's pretty neat that you can take a web server written in C++, implement some new compression algorithm in Go, and then have that web server compress pages with your Go code without having to recompile the webserver or touch any of its code. That's what WebAssembly outside of the browser offers; you can just write stuff in your language of choosing for other products. All the VC hype just means that everyone picked the same backend so there is some possibility of traction. In reality, some flaws are preventing adoption. C and Rust are pretty much the only viable languages with WebAssembly support, and since those are also the chosen implementation languages for runtime, nobody is really deriving this benefit. (Anything with a runtime seems to fail for programs beyond "hello world".) (I tried a "real program" and WebAssembly once, but it ran out of memory when compiled with either gc or tinygo. We had to write the browser side of things in Javascript, which was a shame. The code in question was: https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm/blob/master/src/internal/archiveserver/encode.go#L22 https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm/blob/master/src/inter.... Somewhat complex, but not so complex you can't do it in Javascript. So a bit of a shame that WebAssembly didn't work out.) The other thing that I think WebAssembly should fix (but people seem to want to kill me when I mention this) is that the Typescript compiler should just output WebAssembly and we can forget about node_modules and Webpack and that whole nightmare. There is AssemblyScript, but it doesn't run React, so doesn't matter for this use case. Someday I will go insane and just compile node or deno to WebAssembly and just ship the whole VM with my app embedded in it. Then you'll have a real reason to want to kill me! Muahahaha.