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by LunaSea 807 days ago
Really? I can't think of a mainstream (as in used daily) site that uses WASM.

Do you have some in mind?

5 comments

Sure, many major sites use it, such as Zoom, Google Sheets, and Photoshop. As the article mentions, you wouldn't know they are using Wasm under the hood unless you open the devtools and inspect the details.

Many more examples, such as those mentioned in this talk about Wasm usage in Google:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2En8cj6xlv4

They mention Google Photos, Google Meet, Google Earth, TensorFlow.js, Ink, CanvasKit, Flutter, etc. And that is just inside Google - many other companies are using it, big and small, such as Figma, Unity, Adobe, etc.

https://madewithwebassembly.com/

I see a few major sites and some major plugins. The definition of "mainstream (as in used daily) site" may differ between groups.

Figma has been powered by WebAssembly for the past 7 years.
What parts of Figma though? Is it just used for cpu intensive operations like triangulation of svgs to render in webgl or is the site's core logic all done is wasm?

I'm sorry, I don't use Figma but I'm really curious about its tech stack

They have a bunch of nice blogposts about that:

https://www.figma.com/blog/webassembly-cut-figmas-load-time-...

The main part of the app is in wasm, I believe (it's in C++ that they compile).

Lichess and Chess.com use it for local position evaluation and playing against the computer (in analysis).
Yep, they compiled Stockfish to wasm. Now everyone has access to the best chess engine in the world, right there in the browser, no need to install anything. Really nifty.