[krapp]

Webassembly isn't designed or intended to run exclusively in the browser, though. A lot of people seem to assume that native webassembly apps would be packaged with Electron but I think that when the language matures a bit, it should be possible to get thinner native VMs without the unnecessary bulk of a browser.

[littlestymaar]

Why would you package it in Electron? AFAIK, webassembly is mainly intended to be run on the web, in the browser. The main goal being you don't need to install anything.

Building a native app to wasm to package it into Electron sounds really weird to me. OK there's a security benefit thanks to sandboxing, but using Electron as a sandbox is really a strange idea.

And when it comes to portability, if you build you native app to webassembly, it can run anywhere. But if you add Electron to the mix, you need to build a different version for each platform, which destroy the portability benefit. If your app can be built on wasm, it can probably be compiled for different platform already. Adding Electron to the mix doesn't change any of that.

[yoz-y]

Browsers still can not access the filesystem correctly, can't communicate with most of the devices you could plug into your computer, can't reasonably use keyboard shortcuts and so on.

Electron can.

[littlestymaar]

But the native version already does that! What can electron do that the native version cannot ? The point of electron is that it let you write code once (in JavaScript or something that transpile to js, like TypeScript or Elm) and built multi-plateform software. But if you have a native software that can be built in wasm, it also can be built on Windows + Mac + Linux. Why using electron in that case?

Electron is great if you don't want to write native code (and deal with the debugging complexity of C or C++). If you already have a cross-plateform native app in written with Qt, why the hell would you want to put that in Electron?! And remind that if your C++ isn't cross-plateform already, you won't be able to build to wasm.

[yoz-y]

You are right, in this case it does not make sense since you can already distribute the Qt compiled version.

[littlestymaar]

And even if you want to ship native code within your Electron app, why would you use wasm instead of the native code with ffi ?

[yoz-y]

This would of course have to be tested but there might be less overhead? I haven’t used FFI but they mention that it is significant. I have written a V8 add-on using NAN and the performance is very good (as in passing relatively large arrays between C++ and Node is in the few microsecond range)

[imtringued]

You can just use nodejs to execute wasm code. Not sure about how to have a native GUI though.