6 ms·

WebAssembly: Yes, but for What?

95 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

dovys 1y ago
Majority of my phone usage outside of reading HN is through dedicated apps. News, social media, chats and even substack. If I was building a product today, web would be quite low on the priority list outside of SEO capture.
- msgodel 1y ago
  The problem with dedicated apps is that you often have to fight with the OS vendor for basic functionality in your app just to distribute it and these days you don't actually gain much with a dedicated app since modern sandboxing is so aggressive and web apis are relatively complete.
  - meepmorp 1y ago
    IMO as an end user - aggressive sandboxing is a feature, not a bug
    - amelius 1y ago
      A browser is a sandbox.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      Browsers already do this much better. If you don't trust something that's where it belongs, not as a local app.
  - criddell 1y ago
    > you don’t actually gain much Some of what you gain is pretty important though. For example, well written native apps integrate better with the platform’s accessibility features and they typically consume less power, storage, and memory.
    - msgodel 1y ago
      I'd contest the storage point pretty strongly. Well written web apps can be very accessible too and some companies do actually go out of their way to ensure this.
- rantingdemon 1y ago
  I absolutely hate this state of affairs. Apps don't allow me to open multiple tabs, as an example.
  - gear54rus 1y ago
    But they do allow showing unblockable ads and notifications, so some 'people' absolutely love that state of affairs because they benefit from it.
    - latexr 1y ago
      I don’t know what the state is on Android, but on iOS (and macOS) unblockable notifications aren’t really a thing (notifications need permissions that you manage on a per-app basis) and many app ads can also be blocked (1Blocker does it), though it’s not as powerful because it’s essentially domain blocking. I’m not disagreeing with you, merely providing more context. Companies like Reddit and Facebook definitely push you more to the apps so they can extract more value out of you.
      - gear54rus 1y ago
        What if you want to see some notifications but not others? But the developers are scammy and didn't separate ads into their own channel?
        latexr 1y ago
        Then that’s a shitty company and perhaps you should consider not using their service anymore. Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard.
        gear54rus 1y ago
        > Then that’s a shitty company and perhaps you should consider not using their service anymore. That's not always possible. There might not be enough quality competition and I don't see others following my example to beat the shitty company into submission and make them change their ways if I do that. > Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard. Web is very different in that regard. You can pry any app open and change basically anything with a single press of F12. Most of the time, people already did that for you and submitted an ad blocking filter for everyone to use. This isn't even close to the crapware of a typical app store. Web is the last democratic platform we have left.
- amelius 1y ago
  All the more reason to stand up against it and choose the web.
- michaelbuckbee 1y ago
  It used to be that cli tools were the power users preference but now I feel like that's shifted to web apps (over native). The ability to have multiple tabs/views, load extensions to customize behavior, adjust sizing, etc. As an example: an absolutely vital tool for me is the Vimium keyboard control extension for navigation, which unfortunately can't be used in dedicated apps.
- skybrian 1y ago
  I'm wondering which of us is the outlier, because I heavily use browser apps on my phone and tablet and ignore vendors' prompts to install their native apps. (Other than Google apps, that is.)
whywhywhywhy 1y ago
> TypeScript works better for Figma's needs, then, over time, new features will be written in TypeScript instead. Indeed, looking at the breakdown of Figma over time would seem to reveal that is what has occurred; Wasm is still used for some per-pixel operations, where its greater control over data layout makes it a win, but the application is composed of relatively more JS than Wasm... >...if you are building an organization to create a web experience, generally speaking, you would rather pull from the deeper pool of JS developers than the more rarified C++/Wasm skill set This is ultimately answering the reason why above, but it's important to point out the most critical parts of Figma and the reason Figma is worth what it is are the WASM/GPU accelerated parts which make all the interaction snappy and fluid, even the multiplayer stuff is downstream from this. But also because it's a huge company now and a lot of the developers they hire could never create those critical parts of course the rest of it will bloat out as developers justify their existence.
lylejantzi3rd 1y ago
No mention of Orca[0]? WebAssembly Apps Without the Web. A brand new stack for cross-platform applications. https://orca-app.dev/ https://orca-app.dev/
- kerkeslager 1y ago
  I just don't understand why you'd want this, or any of the JS server-side nonsense. WebAssembly is designed for the web--why would you want to use it outside the browser, when there are dozens of much more mature frameworks out there that were designed to work on your machine? It seems to me like a lot of the JS outside the browser stuff out there is motivated by JS people not wanting to learn something different. Meanwhile for those of us who have been doing dev outside the browser, all this is worse solutions to problems we've already got solutions for.
  - brigandish 1y ago
    Same reason Docker was a success - packaging and distribution of apps becomes easier. That's my guess.
    - quaintdev 1y ago
      So are we inventing JVM again?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - freeone3000 1y ago
        Yes. But with manual memory management this time.
      - jowea 1y ago
        Java inside the browser was a thing too, right?
CyanLite2 1y ago
It's a tale of bureaucracy. The tech community simply wants DOM access for web apps, but the committee is focused on trying to effectively rewrite the JVM in Rust because Rust seems trendy these days. So the web features languish while the committee still can't agree on how to send strings between two functions on Linux. And the committee moves at a slower pace than the federal government.
- falcor84 1y ago
  > And the committee moves at a slower pace than the federal government. As for that, I for one would ask that the federal government revert to going a bit more slowly.
  - apwell23 1y ago
    > As for that, I for one would ask that the federal government revert to going a bit more slowly. so ppl can be stuck in immigration queue for even longer ?
    - afavour 1y ago
      As an alternative to being pulled off the street and indefinitely detained? Yes? As someone who went through the US immigration system I'm not deluded about its flaws. But the current situation is absolutely worse.
      - apwell23 1y ago
        i am guessing you personally don't have family stuck overseas waiting for immigration paperwork to move. Its ok separate those ppl from their families?
        actionfromafar 1y ago
        Indefinitely detained. How can paperwork be worse than that?
mootoday 1y ago
I hadn't really been interested in WebAssembly until I read about the component model and the fact that I can run Wasm components on the server. That led me to wasmCloud[1]. As the article says, Wasm on the server isn't a winner yet, but it has a chance. [1] https://wasmcloud.com https://wasmcloud.com
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  That seems... weirdly indirect, when you can run binaries directly on the server. If it's a VM or isolation you need, there's Docker. It feels just like "server-side rendering" of front-end UI libraries/frameworks like react and co. But maybe I'm missing something.
  - mootoday 1y ago
    What I get is isolation, so I can run untrusted customer code as a Wasm component knowing it runs in a secure sandbox. Also, scaling across clouds, edge, on-prem with minimal effort. Another benefit I enjoy now is changing links between components at runtime. I can for example deploy v2.0.0 of a component and send traffic to it by simply updating a link - and reverse it should things break. All that comes at a much lighter cost in terms of actual $, but also size (kilobytes/megabytes vs megabytes/gigabytes with Docker containers)
dtagames 1y ago
Photoshop for the web isn't a "port" of the application. It was rewritten with web components for the UI and WASM for the image processing routines. The most notable thing about PS in the browser is web components, not WASM.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Adobe describes it as a port https://web.dev/articles/ps-on-the-web#webassembly_porting_with_emscripten https://web.dev/articles/ps-on-the-web#webassembly_porting_w... largely because most of the work in doing so was not related to the updated UI front end. As such, the use of Web Components is just one section of many notable things.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  I have yet to encounter a scenario where Web Components or Shadow DOM are important for a big app like that where you own the stack. Their value is in creating components third parties can use, which can operate in a moderately hostile environment successfully. First parties have no need of them: React/Svelte/Vue/flavour-of-the-month is strictly better for first party components, and Shadow DOM is quite inappropriate.
  - dtagames 1y ago
    That's strange because all the notable implementations of web components that I'm aware of are first party. YouTube, Discord, Slack, Adobe. MS and Alaska Airlines released libraries (in Lit) but does anyone use them? I think the real value is for first-party complex UIs. The other folks are using React & Friends.
azangru 1y ago
> Indeed, looking at the breakdown of Figma over time would seem to reveal that is what has occurred Where can one look at that breakdown?
gwbas1c 1y ago
I'm currently developing a WASM app in C#. (Via in-browser Blazor). We chose this stack because we're a small team with a lot of C# knowledge, and our server-side is C#. As a result, with a small team we can make a much prettier and slicker app; and it's easy for everyone to be "full stack" without the learning curve that comes with two languages. It's also nice to share code between the server and browser, for things like contracts and small bits of logic that are easily isolated. One of the more frustrating aspects of WASM via C# is the slow load time because the binary is large. Another frustrating aspect is that, for tight integration with the DOM, it still is best to use JavaScript. As a result, we end up spending time writing wrappers for "best of class" JavaScript libraries instead of using C# libraries. --- In our case, with hindsight, I think server-side Blazor (with pure JavaScript or TypeScript for logic that needs to happen in the browser,) would be better for our purposes. (It basically moves a lot of the state that would be in the browser to the server. This is really helpful for small teams.) There's reasons why I don't think we'll switch any time soon.
- stanac 1y ago
  > I think server-side Blazor (with pure JavaScript or TypeScript for logic that needs to happen in the browser,) Do you mean server side rendering or interactive server mode?
  - gwbas1c 1y ago
    Server-side rendering. I haven't tried interactive mode yet. (It wasn't available when we started our project.)
    - jkman 1y ago
      Would you mind commenting on how it's been going so far? My last consultancy never bought in on .NET web frontend and I haven't had the chance to try it out on a side project, your team liking it so far?
- fbn79 1y ago
  If I have learned anything in decades of developing is that adding layers never short times or make life easier
breve 1y ago
For writing Visual Basic 6 on the web: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/
breve 1y ago
> As far as applications go, the most prominent WasmGC deployment is Google Sheets. This spreadsheet app used to evaluate per-cell spreadsheet formulae using Java code, compiled to JS; Sheets has now fully switched to WasmGC (web.dev) instead. There are precious few other prominent examples, however. Amazon switched the Prime Video app to WebAssembly and doubled its performance. They support 8,000 device types: https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-app-for-more-than-8-000-device-types https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-... A recent talk on it with transcript: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/
- bla3 1y ago
  Sounds like they compile rust to wasm, so regular wasm instead of WasmGC is probably enough for them.
kagevf 1y ago
I liked the convention of putting the TLD in parentheses after each link.
azangru 1y ago
> Wasm-compiled SQLite is so successful that it actually replaced a part of the web platform, causing Chrome to remove WebSQL entirely The causual inference here is almost certainly incorrect. According to Chrome Blog [0], WebSQL turned out to be a non-starter as early as November 2010, which is before Webassembly was released, and before it became known that SQLite could be ported to Webassembly to run in web browser. [0] - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/deprecating-web-sql https://developer.chrome.com/blog/deprecating-web-sql
ramesh31 1y ago
>"Wasm works well where isolation is needed between different program parts written by different people." Nailed it. We have JS in the browser, and (particularly with TS) it's a great language for building applications on the web. What's great about WASM is the interop layer we have now between other systems. Our company has a mountain of legacy C++, encoding many years of hard-won business logic, and the ability to tap into that on the frontend (locally, in-client) has been amazing. No more hacky transpilation or maintaining separate codebases; just write your FFI and compile the binary to WASM.
- pjc50 1y ago
  > We have JS in the browser, and (particularly with TS) it's a great language for building applications. This is .. debateable. A large part of the push for WASM is people who believe that other languages should be allowed to exist in the browser.
jchw 1y ago
I think WebAssembly could be amazing for taking chunks of existing programs and making them super portable (and sandboxed!), and it kind of is already, but boy, I was pretty surprised to just recently realize it's not really as polished or complete as I think you'd hope for this use case. If you want to build something like libpng (or a myriad of other C libraries,) you need setjmp/longjmp. Not really a huge problem: Emscripten can handle this, it just needs a tiny bit of help via host functions. You can also use Wasm Exception Handling instead, in which case you don't need any hacks on the host side. So far this sounds pretty good, but actually it isn't, because: - Wasm Exception Handling is still not part of the standard. They are supported by browsers and runtimes based on browsers, but they are unsupported by lots of other runtimes (Wazero doesn't seem to support them, for example.) - When you're using Emscripten outside of a browser, you can use the Emscripten method for sjlj support even in a "standalone" build, calling into some simple host functions, which is handy. The problem is... standalone builds with Emscripten don't really work that well. A lot of the syscalls don't really go anywhere: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/system/lib/standalone/standalone.c#L72 https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/syst... A non-standalone build is possible, but even though Emscripten does use WASI for many things automatically, a lot of host support is required to make this work properly, so outside of a browser environment I reckon this will take a lot of work, and it seems also that it will be hard to properly implement those functions in many of the standalone Wasm runtimes. You can compile with a Clang/WASI toolchain instead, which will implement much more of the syscalls via WASI, but I don't think this supports the Esmcripten method for handling Wasm Exception Handling, which means you need to have a runtime with Wasm Exception Handling support. I guess the Clang/WASI toolchain is doing the right thing here, but it's still somewhat frustrating that Wasm Exception Handling is still not a part of the standard or many of the non-browser runtimes.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  > (or a myriad of other C libraries) Thankfully it's not a myriad, but pretty much only a handful libraries which had been derived from libjpeg one way or another (and libjpeg - and by extension libpng - is a huge pile of excrement, and not just because of its weird "poor man's exception handling via setjmp/longjmp"). If you want to load image files with minimal effort, use stb_image.h instead.
pixelpoet 1y ago
> Wasm still has no shared-memory multithreading Um, yes it does? Sure, you have to set some single-source or whatever flag in some header, but it works just fine - I've tested it myself.
torginus 1y ago
I will go on a record that I never really liked WebAssembly. Google's Native Client allowed people to run safety screened native assembly at like 95% native speed and virtually no startup time, while having a tiny fraction of the engineering complexity. Accessing browser native classes is still an open issue - in fact, you have to go through JS to do anything, with all the associated performance issues. I don't get it why it's so bad - for every native JS class you find on MDN, there's an equivalent C++ class in the Chrome codebase, which somehow gets bound to the JS JIT. Couldn't we expose all the API through a marshalling/validation layer? Memory leaks are a non-issue, since you can leak native objects in both JS and in C, with the only difference being that in JS, the object is still reachable through a gc root. Another huge issue is the crappy multithreading support. First, the multithreading solution of JS workers + SharedArrayBuffer is horrible, second you aren't allowed to do it without draconian and impractical security measures, due to the security theather around side channel attacks. Which makes running heavy apps, like modern video games, practically impossible. I remember Epic demoing Unreal in the browser in the early 2010s and a lot of people predicted that in the future, most games will be playable via a website. Yeah, that didn't come to pass. Instead of becoming the default way of writing and distributing web apps, with the convenience of web deployment and the power of real desktop apps, it became a curiosity and a way of gaining tech clout.
- flohofwoe 1y ago
  > Google's Native Client allowed people to run safety screened native assembly at like 95% native speed and virtually no startup time, while having a tiny fraction of the engineering complexity. I worked both with NaCl and PNaCl, and they both had their own share of problems, like: - any interaction with the browser side had to happen via message passing (e.g. the people who today complain that WASM has no DOM access would have a complete mental breakdown if each interaction with the DOM had to go through message passing instead of direct WASM-to-JS calls). - NaCl had to invent its own APIs for 3D rendering, audio, and pretty much anything else which required any sort of performance (since the only alternative was the above mentioned slow message passing) - The 'main thread' was basically just an event loop, to get continuous rendering you had to spawn a separate thread (much like what you need to do on the Android NDK) - They had their own frigging build system which wasn't compatible with anything else. Good luck getting NaCl/PNaCl integrated with something more common like cmake (it works, but it was basically the same PITA like trying to integrate the Android NDK with a proper build system today). - PNaCl (which was essentially LLVM bitcode) had an enormous startup time, even slower than the very first WASM experiments which used AOT. Also, NaCl was quickly deprecated in favour of PNaCl, but PNaCl suffered from much worse problems than WASM ever had (especially in startup time and runtime performance was at best comparable to WASM).
flohofwoe 1y ago
> they did not translate into massive adoption of Wasm by the gaming industry This is more about monetization and less about technology, and nobody has figured out how to monetize web games beyond hyper-casual 2D games. And you don't need WASM to move a handful 2D sprites around. Personally I'm quite happy what WASM allows me to do, e.g. the browser has become "just another runtime target" for my C/C++ hobby projects: - https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/ https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/ - https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ - https://floooh.github.io/doom-sokol/ https://floooh.github.io/doom-sokol/ ...also the actual problem to run game-y stuff in browsers is not WASM, but the terrible state of web APIs, WebGL and WebGPU are both quite okay-ish, but beyond that it's an absolute mess (but OTH, people also cope with game development for Android, which is even worse).
csomar 1y ago
I've been building my entire back-end with WASM for several months now, and I can share some thoughts: 1. WASM on the Web: Just don't do it. It's not there yet. WASM actually has overhead compared to regular JavaScript, so it only makes sense for specific operations like video transformations. Otherwise, you're better off with a React stack. React isn't inherently slow—it just makes it easy to write slow code. Plus, most WASM frameworks (like Yew) are still immature with limited ecosystem support. 2. "Lightweight virtualization" sounds great in theory, but reality is different. The promise is "compile once, deploy everywhere," but if you can deploy everywhere, you probably can't deploy anywhere effectively. That's because once you remove networking, time and multi-threading, you are left with pretty much nothing. There is also a no consensus standard. There is WASI but it's a kind of a work-in-progress. Implementation will depend on your host. I went with Cloudflare Workers, which meant learning their specific environment. The problem with these newer platforms is they don't have the documentation or community support you get with something like Linux. While Cloudflare runs workers on V8 at the edge (which helps), they have restrictions that you only discover as you go. For example, there's no "time" concept available inside a Cloudflare Worker's execution context. 3. Target support is genuinely terrible. Don't assume libraries will compile to wasm32-unknown-unknown—assume the opposite. Most libraries don't separate computational tasks from networking, and Rust's async ecosystem (Tokio) does not play well with WASM, breaking your code. I've had to fork two libraries and submit patches to several others. As a solo developer, this maintenance burden becomes expensive. Making libraries WASM-compatible could be a full-time job. 4. On Scalability: Just because you have a worker, doesn't translate to having "infinite" scalability. Here's the thing - as soon as your application does anything meaningful, you need state. Now your "infinitely scalable" architecture is only as scalable as your state (ie: RDS database) can handle. There isn't really a good server-less database offering and Databases are not the only thing that will bottleneck you here (ie: I have a keycloak server for signups). > The aim is to build systems with the fine-grained interoperation of shared libraries, specified in a way to allow isolation but without requiring the overhead of an operating system process or a container. Add time and networking to this mix, and you've basically described an operating system. > For plug-in and extension use cases, Wasm can be a good option if the host needs isolation from the guest This is actually WASM's sweet spot. These extensions run in the host environment (like Shopify), and WASM provides JavaScript-like capabilities with language choice and better isolation. > The cloud Wasm space is a bit of a Wild West It absolutely is—still in its infancy with little interest from major players to adopt this model. In conclusion, I'm still torn on the whole thing. Some mornings I wake up to a broken build and wonder what the hell I was thinking. But then there are moments when everything clicks. My worker—27k lines that squeeze down to 3MB—feeling like a jet engine. The constraints make you want to tear your hair out; but they make you think twice about everything. You can't just throw another dependency at a problem. You need to consider and weigh in any additional code. The worker model makes the request flow clearer and gives you a better understanding of your application life-cycle. shamless plug (ps: it's nowhere near ready): https://codeinput.com https://codeinput.com
oulipo 1y ago
I'm interested in WASM for "plugin extensions" on embedded system, where (if?) it would guarantee me a kind of "sandboxed VM" experience, where I know that the resources for the plugins are limited, and that if it crashes, my own code is not affected. I'm trying to use that through Rust on ESP32 with "wamr" but so far I've had quite a few compilation and runtime issues if someone has some experience with that I'm interested :)
socalgal2 1y ago
I’d suggest looking at some of the ideas from Wasm I/O https://m.youtube.com/@wasmio https://m.youtube.com/@wasmio One talk seems to claim they have a tool that auto converts docker containers to wasm for huge efficiency gains Another proposed faster OSes based on wasm’s safety promises Ps: not claiming either of these will work just interest to consider
thisislife2 1y ago
Browser-plugins are a better idea than web assembly. They should have just improved on that than introducing this crap into the core browser engine.
exiguus 1y ago
Another example of Wasm in the browser is: ZetaOffice, which is LibreOffice in the Browser [1]. They recently joined Collabora, which is used for example in OpenDesk[2], which is a replacement for Office365. ZetaOffice talk[3] about the challenges porting Libreoffice to run client-side in the browser. With topics like GUI Event Handling, Debugging or Multi-Threading, File- System & Size to topics such as CI/CD and dependency handling and upstream. [1] https://github.com/allotropia/zetajs https://github.com/allotropia/zetajs / https://zetaoffice.net/ https://zetaoffice.net/ [2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en https://www.opendesk.eu/en [3] https://media.ccc.de/v/clt23-249-libreoffice-technology-and-wasm-history-demos-plans https://media.ccc.de/v/clt23-249-libreoffice-technology-and-...
jauntywundrkind 1y ago
I also strongly enjoyed Daniel Ehrenberg 's recent tour of WebAssembly over time: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support? Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love glue code. Talking some of the technics of integrating with the web, and how component model might someday be a facility to make that reasonable, but how the browser folks are waiting to see how it goes server-side first, & might not be interested at all. I don't really understand what limitations using reference types brings, how much glue code is left. I should try & compare some different language's toolchains, see what glue code each relies on! https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3746174 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3746174 Regarding the submission here... Nothing but respect for Andy here. And yes finding fit is always so critical. But I do think we are on the cusp on much more, and I especially think the actual web, the front end, would/will be getting millions of miles more out of WebAssembly when async wasm components arrive. > To answer these questions, we adopt an aesthetically unsatisfying device: the market. Which Wasm deployments have stuck around? Where are people happily using Wasm? Which deployments failed? These are all real indicators by people with skin in the game. Right now it there are countless constraints on who can use wasm and how. To look at who has been trying today, who has had success today, it kind of ignores that wasm has become an increasingly niche harder to use server side only system. As the number of specs grows less and less runtimes are competitive. Shooting for the moon, but maybe, if async wasm components (wasi preview 3) ship and are good, it could radically expand the ball game.
slinkydeveloper 1y ago
At Restate.dev (workflow as a code engine) we use Rust/WASM to code-share the implementation of the durable execution protocol between the restate-server and the SDKs to develop workflows. This code is essentially a "pure" state machine: events in, events out, no side effects. We use WASM in some cases: * Our Typescript SDK uses wasm-bindgen to compile and release the Rust part of the code. We have chosen WASM over Node native extensions because we wanted to support deno, cloudflare workers, bun, and potentially other runtimes. We've stumbled on few issues related to packaging, but except that it was a smooth process. * Our Golang SDK uses WaZero + manual bindings using protobuf's. It was a bit of a manual process to set it up, especially surrounding concurrency issues wrt accessing the WaZero runtime plus you need some wasm runtime pooling to get decent performance, but at the end it works well and reliably. My lesson learned from our experience is that Rust is the real player here, because it delivers on the promise that you can develop libraries that can be easily embedded in high level languages. It's really "write once, bind everywhere". WASM is just a "packaging"/"distribution" detail in our case, and we picked it just for lack of alternatives. For example in our Python SDK, we could have used WASM but we didn't, instead we went with PyO3 which is an amazingly well done Python -> native code bindgen, and it works without hassle for users as opposed to, for example, CGO in Golang. If Golang had a PyO3-like solution without CGO/any hassle for users, I would have taken it as opposed to doing the WASM bindings myself. Plus, from what I've tried myself, the whole WASM experience is great only when used in combination with TS/wasm-bindgen, in the other scenarios it's a lot of manual tedious memory moving code involved. Maybe when WIT gets more broadly adopted, and there will be bindgens available in most languages/engines, this will be different. If you wanna check out the projects and see how it works: https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-shared-core/ https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-shared-core/, https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-go/ https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-go/ and https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-typescript/ https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-typescript/

95 points by todsacerdoti 1y ago

Majority of my phone usage outside of reading HN is through dedicated apps. News, social media, chats and even substack. If I was building a product today, web would be quite low on the priority list outside of SEO capture.

msgodel 1y ago
The problem with dedicated apps is that you often have to fight with the OS vendor for basic functionality in your app just to distribute it and these days you don't actually gain much with a dedicated app since modern sandboxing is so aggressive and web apis are relatively complete.
- meepmorp 1y ago
  IMO as an end user - aggressive sandboxing is a feature, not a bug
  - amelius 1y ago
    A browser is a sandbox.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    Browsers already do this much better. If you don't trust something that's where it belongs, not as a local app.
- criddell 1y ago
  > you don’t actually gain much Some of what you gain is pretty important though. For example, well written native apps integrate better with the platform’s accessibility features and they typically consume less power, storage, and memory.
  - msgodel 1y ago
    I'd contest the storage point pretty strongly. Well written web apps can be very accessible too and some companies do actually go out of their way to ensure this.
rantingdemon 1y ago
I absolutely hate this state of affairs. Apps don't allow me to open multiple tabs, as an example.
- gear54rus 1y ago
  But they do allow showing unblockable ads and notifications, so some 'people' absolutely love that state of affairs because they benefit from it.
  - latexr 1y ago
    I don’t know what the state is on Android, but on iOS (and macOS) unblockable notifications aren’t really a thing (notifications need permissions that you manage on a per-app basis) and many app ads can also be blocked (1Blocker does it), though it’s not as powerful because it’s essentially domain blocking. I’m not disagreeing with you, merely providing more context. Companies like Reddit and Facebook definitely push you more to the apps so they can extract more value out of you.
    - gear54rus 1y ago
      What if you want to see some notifications but not others? But the developers are scammy and didn't separate ads into their own channel?
      - latexr 1y ago
        Then that’s a shitty company and perhaps you should consider not using their service anymore. Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard.
        gear54rus 1y ago
        > Then that’s a shitty company and perhaps you should consider not using their service anymore. That's not always possible. There might not be enough quality competition and I don't see others following my example to beat the shitty company into submission and make them change their ways if I do that. > Either way I don’t see how that’s relevant to the point. It’s not like the web is any different in that regard. Web is very different in that regard. You can pry any app open and change basically anything with a single press of F12. Most of the time, people already did that for you and submitted an ad blocking filter for everyone to use. This isn't even close to the crapware of a typical app store. Web is the last democratic platform we have left.
amelius 1y ago
All the more reason to stand up against it and choose the web.
michaelbuckbee 1y ago
It used to be that cli tools were the power users preference but now I feel like that's shifted to web apps (over native). The ability to have multiple tabs/views, load extensions to customize behavior, adjust sizing, etc. As an example: an absolutely vital tool for me is the Vimium keyboard control extension for navigation, which unfortunately can't be used in dedicated apps.
skybrian 1y ago
I'm wondering which of us is the outlier, because I heavily use browser apps on my phone and tablet and ignore vendors' prompts to install their native apps. (Other than Google apps, that is.)

whywhywhywhy 1y ago

> TypeScript works better for Figma's needs, then, over time, new features will be written in TypeScript instead. Indeed, looking at the breakdown of Figma over time would seem to reveal that is what has occurred; Wasm is still used for some per-pixel operations, where its greater control over data layout makes it a win, but the application is composed of relatively more JS than Wasm... >...if you are building an organization to create a web experience, generally speaking, you would rather pull from the deeper pool of JS developers than the more rarified C++/Wasm skill set This is ultimately answering the reason why above, but it's important to point out the most critical parts of Figma and the reason Figma is worth what it is are the WASM/GPU accelerated parts which make all the interaction snappy and fluid, even the multiplayer stuff is downstream from this. But also because it's a huge company now and a lot of the developers they hire could never create those critical parts of course the rest of it will bloat out as developers justify their existence.

lylejantzi3rd 1y ago

No mention of Orca[0]? WebAssembly Apps Without the Web. A brand new stack for cross-platform applications. https://orca-app.dev/ https://orca-app.dev/

kerkeslager 1y ago
I just don't understand why you'd want this, or any of the JS server-side nonsense. WebAssembly is designed for the web--why would you want to use it outside the browser, when there are dozens of much more mature frameworks out there that were designed to work on your machine? It seems to me like a lot of the JS outside the browser stuff out there is motivated by JS people not wanting to learn something different. Meanwhile for those of us who have been doing dev outside the browser, all this is worse solutions to problems we've already got solutions for.
- brigandish 1y ago
  Same reason Docker was a success - packaging and distribution of apps becomes easier. That's my guess.
  - quaintdev 1y ago
    So are we inventing JVM again?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - freeone3000 1y ago
      Yes. But with manual memory management this time.
    - jowea 1y ago
      Java inside the browser was a thing too, right?

CyanLite2 1y ago

It's a tale of bureaucracy. The tech community simply wants DOM access for web apps, but the committee is focused on trying to effectively rewrite the JVM in Rust because Rust seems trendy these days. So the web features languish while the committee still can't agree on how to send strings between two functions on Linux. And the committee moves at a slower pace than the federal government.

falcor84 1y ago
> And the committee moves at a slower pace than the federal government. As for that, I for one would ask that the federal government revert to going a bit more slowly.
- apwell23 1y ago
  > As for that, I for one would ask that the federal government revert to going a bit more slowly. so ppl can be stuck in immigration queue for even longer ?
  - afavour 1y ago
    As an alternative to being pulled off the street and indefinitely detained? Yes? As someone who went through the US immigration system I'm not deluded about its flaws. But the current situation is absolutely worse.
    - apwell23 1y ago
      i am guessing you personally don't have family stuck overseas waiting for immigration paperwork to move. Its ok separate those ppl from their families?
      - actionfromafar 1y ago
        Indefinitely detained. How can paperwork be worse than that?

mootoday 1y ago

I hadn't really been interested in WebAssembly until I read about the component model and the fact that I can run Wasm components on the server. That led me to wasmCloud[1]. As the article says, Wasm on the server isn't a winner yet, but it has a chance. [1] https://wasmcloud.com https://wasmcloud.com

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
That seems... weirdly indirect, when you can run binaries directly on the server. If it's a VM or isolation you need, there's Docker. It feels just like "server-side rendering" of front-end UI libraries/frameworks like react and co. But maybe I'm missing something.
- mootoday 1y ago
  What I get is isolation, so I can run untrusted customer code as a Wasm component knowing it runs in a secure sandbox. Also, scaling across clouds, edge, on-prem with minimal effort. Another benefit I enjoy now is changing links between components at runtime. I can for example deploy v2.0.0 of a component and send traffic to it by simply updating a link - and reverse it should things break. All that comes at a much lighter cost in terms of actual $, but also size (kilobytes/megabytes vs megabytes/gigabytes with Docker containers)

dtagames 1y ago

Photoshop for the web isn't a "port" of the application. It was rewritten with web components for the UI and WASM for the image processing routines. The most notable thing about PS in the browser is web components, not WASM.

zamadatix 1y ago
Adobe describes it as a port https://web.dev/articles/ps-on-the-web#webassembly_porting_with_emscripten https://web.dev/articles/ps-on-the-web#webassembly_porting_w... largely because most of the work in doing so was not related to the updated UI front end. As such, the use of Web Components is just one section of many notable things.
chrismorgan 1y ago
I have yet to encounter a scenario where Web Components or Shadow DOM are important for a big app like that where you own the stack. Their value is in creating components third parties can use, which can operate in a moderately hostile environment successfully. First parties have no need of them: React/Svelte/Vue/flavour-of-the-month is strictly better for first party components, and Shadow DOM is quite inappropriate.
- dtagames 1y ago
  That's strange because all the notable implementations of web components that I'm aware of are first party. YouTube, Discord, Slack, Adobe. MS and Alaska Airlines released libraries (in Lit) but does anyone use them? I think the real value is for first-party complex UIs. The other folks are using React & Friends.

azangru 1y ago

> Indeed, looking at the breakdown of Figma over time would seem to reveal that is what has occurred Where can one look at that breakdown?

gwbas1c 1y ago

I'm currently developing a WASM app in C#. (Via in-browser Blazor). We chose this stack because we're a small team with a lot of C# knowledge, and our server-side is C#. As a result, with a small team we can make a much prettier and slicker app; and it's easy for everyone to be "full stack" without the learning curve that comes with two languages. It's also nice to share code between the server and browser, for things like contracts and small bits of logic that are easily isolated. One of the more frustrating aspects of WASM via C# is the slow load time because the binary is large. Another frustrating aspect is that, for tight integration with the DOM, it still is best to use JavaScript. As a result, we end up spending time writing wrappers for "best of class" JavaScript libraries instead of using C# libraries. --- In our case, with hindsight, I think server-side Blazor (with pure JavaScript or TypeScript for logic that needs to happen in the browser,) would be better for our purposes. (It basically moves a lot of the state that would be in the browser to the server. This is really helpful for small teams.) There's reasons why I don't think we'll switch any time soon.

stanac 1y ago
> I think server-side Blazor (with pure JavaScript or TypeScript for logic that needs to happen in the browser,) Do you mean server side rendering or interactive server mode?
- gwbas1c 1y ago
  Server-side rendering. I haven't tried interactive mode yet. (It wasn't available when we started our project.)
  - jkman 1y ago
    Would you mind commenting on how it's been going so far? My last consultancy never bought in on .NET web frontend and I haven't had the chance to try it out on a side project, your team liking it so far?
fbn79 1y ago
If I have learned anything in decades of developing is that adding layers never short times or make life easier

breve 1y ago

For writing Visual Basic 6 on the web: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/

breve 1y ago

> As far as applications go, the most prominent WasmGC deployment is Google Sheets. This spreadsheet app used to evaluate per-cell spreadsheet formulae using Java code, compiled to JS; Sheets has now fully switched to WasmGC (web.dev) instead. There are precious few other prominent examples, however. Amazon switched the Prime Video app to WebAssembly and doubled its performance. They support 8,000 device types: https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-app-for-more-than-8-000-device-types https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-... A recent talk on it with transcript: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/

bla3 1y ago
Sounds like they compile rust to wasm, so regular wasm instead of WasmGC is probably enough for them.

kagevf 1y ago

I liked the convention of putting the TLD in parentheses after each link.

azangru 1y ago

> Wasm-compiled SQLite is so successful that it actually replaced a part of the web platform, causing Chrome to remove WebSQL entirely The causual inference here is almost certainly incorrect. According to Chrome Blog [0], WebSQL turned out to be a non-starter as early as November 2010, which is before Webassembly was released, and before it became known that SQLite could be ported to Webassembly to run in web browser. [0] - https://developer.chrome.com/blog/deprecating-web-sql https://developer.chrome.com/blog/deprecating-web-sql

ramesh31 1y ago

>"Wasm works well where isolation is needed between different program parts written by different people." Nailed it. We have JS in the browser, and (particularly with TS) it's a great language for building applications on the web. What's great about WASM is the interop layer we have now between other systems. Our company has a mountain of legacy C++, encoding many years of hard-won business logic, and the ability to tap into that on the frontend (locally, in-client) has been amazing. No more hacky transpilation or maintaining separate codebases; just write your FFI and compile the binary to WASM.

pjc50 1y ago
> We have JS in the browser, and (particularly with TS) it's a great language for building applications. This is .. debateable. A large part of the push for WASM is people who believe that other languages should be allowed to exist in the browser.

jchw 1y ago

I think WebAssembly could be amazing for taking chunks of existing programs and making them super portable (and sandboxed!), and it kind of is already, but boy, I was pretty surprised to just recently realize it's not really as polished or complete as I think you'd hope for this use case. If you want to build something like libpng (or a myriad of other C libraries,) you need setjmp/longjmp. Not really a huge problem: Emscripten can handle this, it just needs a tiny bit of help via host functions. You can also use Wasm Exception Handling instead, in which case you don't need any hacks on the host side. So far this sounds pretty good, but actually it isn't, because: - Wasm Exception Handling is still not part of the standard. They are supported by browsers and runtimes based on browsers, but they are unsupported by lots of other runtimes (Wazero doesn't seem to support them, for example.) - When you're using Emscripten outside of a browser, you can use the Emscripten method for sjlj support even in a "standalone" build, calling into some simple host functions, which is handy. The problem is... standalone builds with Emscripten don't really work that well. A lot of the syscalls don't really go anywhere: https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/system/lib/standalone/standalone.c#L72 https://github.com/emscripten-core/emscripten/blob/main/syst... A non-standalone build is possible, but even though Emscripten does use WASI for many things automatically, a lot of host support is required to make this work properly, so outside of a browser environment I reckon this will take a lot of work, and it seems also that it will be hard to properly implement those functions in many of the standalone Wasm runtimes. You can compile with a Clang/WASI toolchain instead, which will implement much more of the syscalls via WASI, but I don't think this supports the Esmcripten method for handling Wasm Exception Handling, which means you need to have a runtime with Wasm Exception Handling support. I guess the Clang/WASI toolchain is doing the right thing here, but it's still somewhat frustrating that Wasm Exception Handling is still not a part of the standard or many of the non-browser runtimes.

flohofwoe 1y ago
> (or a myriad of other C libraries) Thankfully it's not a myriad, but pretty much only a handful libraries which had been derived from libjpeg one way or another (and libjpeg - and by extension libpng - is a huge pile of excrement, and not just because of its weird "poor man's exception handling via setjmp/longjmp"). If you want to load image files with minimal effort, use stb_image.h instead.

pixelpoet 1y ago

> Wasm still has no shared-memory multithreading Um, yes it does? Sure, you have to set some single-source or whatever flag in some header, but it works just fine - I've tested it myself.

torginus 1y ago

I will go on a record that I never really liked WebAssembly. Google's Native Client allowed people to run safety screened native assembly at like 95% native speed and virtually no startup time, while having a tiny fraction of the engineering complexity. Accessing browser native classes is still an open issue - in fact, you have to go through JS to do anything, with all the associated performance issues. I don't get it why it's so bad - for every native JS class you find on MDN, there's an equivalent C++ class in the Chrome codebase, which somehow gets bound to the JS JIT. Couldn't we expose all the API through a marshalling/validation layer? Memory leaks are a non-issue, since you can leak native objects in both JS and in C, with the only difference being that in JS, the object is still reachable through a gc root. Another huge issue is the crappy multithreading support. First, the multithreading solution of JS workers + SharedArrayBuffer is horrible, second you aren't allowed to do it without draconian and impractical security measures, due to the security theather around side channel attacks. Which makes running heavy apps, like modern video games, practically impossible. I remember Epic demoing Unreal in the browser in the early 2010s and a lot of people predicted that in the future, most games will be playable via a website. Yeah, that didn't come to pass. Instead of becoming the default way of writing and distributing web apps, with the convenience of web deployment and the power of real desktop apps, it became a curiosity and a way of gaining tech clout.

flohofwoe 1y ago
> Google's Native Client allowed people to run safety screened native assembly at like 95% native speed and virtually no startup time, while having a tiny fraction of the engineering complexity. I worked both with NaCl and PNaCl, and they both had their own share of problems, like: - any interaction with the browser side had to happen via message passing (e.g. the people who today complain that WASM has no DOM access would have a complete mental breakdown if each interaction with the DOM had to go through message passing instead of direct WASM-to-JS calls). - NaCl had to invent its own APIs for 3D rendering, audio, and pretty much anything else which required any sort of performance (since the only alternative was the above mentioned slow message passing) - The 'main thread' was basically just an event loop, to get continuous rendering you had to spawn a separate thread (much like what you need to do on the Android NDK) - They had their own frigging build system which wasn't compatible with anything else. Good luck getting NaCl/PNaCl integrated with something more common like cmake (it works, but it was basically the same PITA like trying to integrate the Android NDK with a proper build system today). - PNaCl (which was essentially LLVM bitcode) had an enormous startup time, even slower than the very first WASM experiments which used AOT. Also, NaCl was quickly deprecated in favour of PNaCl, but PNaCl suffered from much worse problems than WASM ever had (especially in startup time and runtime performance was at best comparable to WASM).

flohofwoe 1y ago

> they did not translate into massive adoption of Wasm by the gaming industry This is more about monetization and less about technology, and nobody has figured out how to monetize web games beyond hyper-casual 2D games. And you don't need WASM to move a handful 2D sprites around. Personally I'm quite happy what WASM allows me to do, e.g. the browser has become "just another runtime target" for my C/C++ hobby projects: - https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/ https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/ - https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/ - https://floooh.github.io/doom-sokol/ https://floooh.github.io/doom-sokol/ ...also the actual problem to run game-y stuff in browsers is not WASM, but the terrible state of web APIs, WebGL and WebGPU are both quite okay-ish, but beyond that it's an absolute mess (but OTH, people also cope with game development for Android, which is even worse).

csomar 1y ago

I've been building my entire back-end with WASM for several months now, and I can share some thoughts: 1. WASM on the Web: Just don't do it. It's not there yet. WASM actually has overhead compared to regular JavaScript, so it only makes sense for specific operations like video transformations. Otherwise, you're better off with a React stack. React isn't inherently slow—it just makes it easy to write slow code. Plus, most WASM frameworks (like Yew) are still immature with limited ecosystem support. 2. "Lightweight virtualization" sounds great in theory, but reality is different. The promise is "compile once, deploy everywhere," but if you can deploy everywhere, you probably can't deploy anywhere effectively. That's because once you remove networking, time and multi-threading, you are left with pretty much nothing. There is also a no consensus standard. There is WASI but it's a kind of a work-in-progress. Implementation will depend on your host. I went with Cloudflare Workers, which meant learning their specific environment. The problem with these newer platforms is they don't have the documentation or community support you get with something like Linux. While Cloudflare runs workers on V8 at the edge (which helps), they have restrictions that you only discover as you go. For example, there's no "time" concept available inside a Cloudflare Worker's execution context. 3. Target support is genuinely terrible. Don't assume libraries will compile to wasm32-unknown-unknown—assume the opposite. Most libraries don't separate computational tasks from networking, and Rust's async ecosystem (Tokio) does not play well with WASM, breaking your code. I've had to fork two libraries and submit patches to several others. As a solo developer, this maintenance burden becomes expensive. Making libraries WASM-compatible could be a full-time job. 4. On Scalability: Just because you have a worker, doesn't translate to having "infinite" scalability. Here's the thing - as soon as your application does anything meaningful, you need state. Now your "infinitely scalable" architecture is only as scalable as your state (ie: RDS database) can handle. There isn't really a good server-less database offering and Databases are not the only thing that will bottleneck you here (ie: I have a keycloak server for signups). > The aim is to build systems with the fine-grained interoperation of shared libraries, specified in a way to allow isolation but without requiring the overhead of an operating system process or a container. Add time and networking to this mix, and you've basically described an operating system. > For plug-in and extension use cases, Wasm can be a good option if the host needs isolation from the guest This is actually WASM's sweet spot. These extensions run in the host environment (like Shopify), and WASM provides JavaScript-like capabilities with language choice and better isolation. > The cloud Wasm space is a bit of a Wild West It absolutely is—still in its infancy with little interest from major players to adopt this model. In conclusion, I'm still torn on the whole thing. Some mornings I wake up to a broken build and wonder what the hell I was thinking. But then there are moments when everything clicks. My worker—27k lines that squeeze down to 3MB—feeling like a jet engine. The constraints make you want to tear your hair out; but they make you think twice about everything. You can't just throw another dependency at a problem. You need to consider and weigh in any additional code. The worker model makes the request flow clearer and gives you a better understanding of your application life-cycle. shamless plug (ps: it's nowhere near ready): https://codeinput.com https://codeinput.com

oulipo 1y ago

I'm interested in WASM for "plugin extensions" on embedded system, where (if?) it would guarantee me a kind of "sandboxed VM" experience, where I know that the resources for the plugins are limited, and that if it crashes, my own code is not affected. I'm trying to use that through Rust on ESP32 with "wamr" but so far I've had quite a few compilation and runtime issues if someone has some experience with that I'm interested :)

socalgal2 1y ago

I’d suggest looking at some of the ideas from Wasm I/O https://m.youtube.com/@wasmio https://m.youtube.com/@wasmio One talk seems to claim they have a tool that auto converts docker containers to wasm for huge efficiency gains Another proposed faster OSes based on wasm’s safety promises Ps: not claiming either of these will work just interest to consider

thisislife2 1y ago

Browser-plugins are a better idea than web assembly. They should have just improved on that than introducing this crap into the core browser engine.

exiguus 1y ago

Another example of Wasm in the browser is: ZetaOffice, which is LibreOffice in the Browser [1]. They recently joined Collabora, which is used for example in OpenDesk[2], which is a replacement for Office365. ZetaOffice talk[3] about the challenges porting Libreoffice to run client-side in the browser. With topics like GUI Event Handling, Debugging or Multi-Threading, File- System & Size to topics such as CI/CD and dependency handling and upstream. [1] https://github.com/allotropia/zetajs https://github.com/allotropia/zetajs / https://zetaoffice.net/ https://zetaoffice.net/ [2] https://www.opendesk.eu/en https://www.opendesk.eu/en [3] https://media.ccc.de/v/clt23-249-libreoffice-technology-and-wasm-history-demos-plans https://media.ccc.de/v/clt23-249-libreoffice-technology-and-...

jauntywundrkind 1y ago

I also strongly enjoyed Daniel Ehrenberg 's recent tour of WebAssembly over time: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support? Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love glue code. Talking some of the technics of integrating with the web, and how component model might someday be a facility to make that reasonable, but how the browser folks are waiting to see how it goes server-side first, & might not be interested at all. I don't really understand what limitations using reference types brings, how much glue code is left. I should try & compare some different language's toolchains, see what glue code each relies on! https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3746174 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3746174 Regarding the submission here... Nothing but respect for Andy here. And yes finding fit is always so critical. But I do think we are on the cusp on much more, and I especially think the actual web, the front end, would/will be getting millions of miles more out of WebAssembly when async wasm components arrive. > To answer these questions, we adopt an aesthetically unsatisfying device: the market. Which Wasm deployments have stuck around? Where are people happily using Wasm? Which deployments failed? These are all real indicators by people with skin in the game. Right now it there are countless constraints on who can use wasm and how. To look at who has been trying today, who has had success today, it kind of ignores that wasm has become an increasingly niche harder to use server side only system. As the number of specs grows less and less runtimes are competitive. Shooting for the moon, but maybe, if async wasm components (wasi preview 3) ship and are good, it could radically expand the ball game.

slinkydeveloper 1y ago

At Restate.dev (workflow as a code engine) we use Rust/WASM to code-share the implementation of the durable execution protocol between the restate-server and the SDKs to develop workflows. This code is essentially a "pure" state machine: events in, events out, no side effects. We use WASM in some cases: * Our Typescript SDK uses wasm-bindgen to compile and release the Rust part of the code. We have chosen WASM over Node native extensions because we wanted to support deno, cloudflare workers, bun, and potentially other runtimes. We've stumbled on few issues related to packaging, but except that it was a smooth process. * Our Golang SDK uses WaZero + manual bindings using protobuf's. It was a bit of a manual process to set it up, especially surrounding concurrency issues wrt accessing the WaZero runtime plus you need some wasm runtime pooling to get decent performance, but at the end it works well and reliably. My lesson learned from our experience is that Rust is the real player here, because it delivers on the promise that you can develop libraries that can be easily embedded in high level languages. It's really "write once, bind everywhere". WASM is just a "packaging"/"distribution" detail in our case, and we picked it just for lack of alternatives. For example in our Python SDK, we could have used WASM but we didn't, instead we went with PyO3 which is an amazingly well done Python -> native code bindgen, and it works without hassle for users as opposed to, for example, CGO in Golang. If Golang had a PyO3-like solution without CGO/any hassle for users, I would have taken it as opposed to doing the WASM bindings myself. Plus, from what I've tried myself, the whole WASM experience is great only when used in combination with TS/wasm-bindgen, in the other scenarios it's a lot of manual tedious memory moving code involved. Maybe when WIT gets more broadly adopted, and there will be bindgens available in most languages/engines, this will be different. If you wanna check out the projects and see how it works: https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-shared-core/ https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-shared-core/, https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-go/ https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-go/ and https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-typescript/ https://github.com/restatedev/sdk-typescript/