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Author here, it is super encouraging to see this trending on HN, thank you for the great discussion, links, and ideas! I hope to change how learning, using, and contributing to WordPress looks like. This writeup explores how WASM WordPress works and why it's useful: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2022/09/23/client-side-webas... Here's a few possible applications: try a theme without affecting your current website, have live themes and plugins demos right in the directory, enable first contributions directly on wordpress.org without any setup steps, learn WordPress in the browser, or replay and debug failed tests right in the CI. Technically most of these things are possible today with a specialized backend. The problem is that it's either expensive and time-consuming to maintain, like a fleet of custom WP instances, or limited, like iframing a preconfigured 3rd party solution. WASM-based solution is open-source, cheap to run, and doesn't seem to have deal-breaking limitations. I wouldn't run production websites on this just yet, as it sometimes crashes in Chrome and the bundle size is 50MB+, but both problems can be solved. Once they are, this will be so much more than just a cool tech demo. |