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I can't say I'm too experienced in writing code for WASM, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised when I experimented with Go. It has to be said that I have many (mostly subjective) problems with the Go language and the ecosystem, but with the help of GoLand I was productive in minutes. The layer for exchanging arguments between the browser and the "native" code is a bit weird, but once you get passed that, it's easy to get going. The Rust problem with WASM is more about learning Rust well and picking the right libraries (many of them have dependencies that don't work well in the browser!). Setting up tools like cargo to compile usable WASM files also takes a little practice, but that's at most an afternoon of messing around before you should be reasonably comfortable with it. In my opinion, the main improvements Rust brings to the table are the (memory) security features and the fearless multithreading, but neither of them are of much use within the WASM runtime. The borrow checker will still help you write correct code, but it can be an unnecessary pain in the ass when it doesn't need to be. Rust is a great systems programming language, but I'm not so sure about it becoming the de-facto WASM standard. Of course, if you already know Rust, or know a library that would be super useful to you, it's great that Rust can Just Work (TM) with the right setup. First-party tooling support is pretty great for a language to have! If I had to choose, I think I'd pick a language that I'm comfortable with (C#, Kotlin, Java) and has the necessary libraries easily available, and see if the tooling works well for my use cases. I'm also watching Zig evolve with interest; it's not quite there yet, but it's integration with C libraries and some of its more modern language features are very promising. WASM code doesn't need many of the complexities modern languages bring, but older languages like C can lead to dangerous programming paradigms, so I think a mix between the two can produce clean, performant and fully-featured code. I wouldn't recommend it for production use yet, though, as the language is still in constant development with breaking changes between point releases! |