[govolckurself]

The biggest bottleneck in web applications was, is, and ever shall be, roundtrip time to the database, especially now that nobody bothers to install MySQL on the same box anymore, so every query has to go over the network. Of course, that's in a sane web application. Trendier approaches also try to shovel 10 MB of JavaScript over the wire first, so you can then call your API (which is slow for other reasons), and then render the result (which is also slow because you've shoveled 10 MB of JavaScript into the user's browser).

The language you choose matters relatively little.

[jeroenhd]

I disagree, those 10MB of JS easily become 40MB of WASM. Picking a language that's compiled to Javascript for frontend code is the only good choice IMO.

WASM is not unlike the JARs and SWFs we got shoved down our throat ten years ago when HTML and JS were lacking any useful web capabilities. Huge files with separate runtime that implement their own renderer and operating environment. Google Docs already does this, using a canvas element to render to rather than using HTML and CSS to lay out text.

[madeofpalk]

> using a canvas element to render to rather than using HTML and CSS to lay out text.

That is independent to whether WASM is being used or not. Two completely orthogonal concerns.