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"predictable performance for numeric-heavy, legacy" You mean all that 'legacy' C++ meant for the web? Yes, I see what someone might mean, i.e Autocad able to re-use a lot of code, but those are small use cases. And as for 'predictability' ... is it really predictable in application, given the amount of quasi-compilation that has to happen to get to WASM, and, more important, does it matter if it's predictable if it's slow, or rather, V8 is 'fast enough' in comparison? The fact is, WASM is a Zombie Technology. It's odd that it continues to exist, like Bitcoin it has a few vested interests, and the 'dream' seems real, but there are just very few material uses cases, and the practical reality of doing anything functional with WASM is very small. It's an intellectual concept, created without any specific customers/users in mind, and as such has very little adoption. Because V8 is 'so good' and 'fit to purpose' and increasingly so (whatever stated objectives are), it means the real opportunity for WASM just fades. Porting old C++ is a narrow case, and writing new C++ with a janky toolchain, and very limited ways to interact with networking, and UI ... all for what reason again? |
> Wasm has the goal of high, predictable performance for numeric-heavy, legacy-, and low-level code
The OP was porting a application that is in the class of "numeric-heavy" so he had a good profit from his endeavor, as this is a right case for it.
In the low-level class there's great cases like porting MMPEG and using it straight from the browser. Of course it will be not as usable as a native application that links to MMPEG, but it will make a lot of cool things possible.
legacy: Now for instance Adobe could port Flash to WebAssembly with probably the same result. Or we could have that sweet atari emulator right in the browser.
This is not hyped as some other point of views that see WASM as a universal IR that will take the world.
I dout a lot of Javascript and Typescript code will have major benefits into porting to WebAssembly if they dont fall into one of those three categories, so most people dont need to see it as a menace, as Javascript is still being treated as a first-class citizen in the VM's.