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by miki_oomiri 145 days ago
You have the wrong understanding about wasm. It's absolutely not supposed to be replacing HTML, CSS or JS.

And yes wasm is used wildly. On the web for expensive computation (Google earth, figma, autocad, unity games) or server side for portability and sandboxing (Cloudflare workers, fastly, …)
1 comments
IshKebab 145 days ago
It is definitely meant to replace JS in some applications. It isn't quite there yet for normal web pages but it will be eventually. There are a few front-end web frameworks written in Rust that use WASM.

The whole "it's not meant to replace JS" thing was just to reduce pushback from JS devs.

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miki_oomiri 145 days ago
> The whole "it's not meant to replace JS" thing was just to reduce pushback from JS devs.

It was born at the same time as webgl, at the time of Jit optimisation for js engines. As a subset of js first, then as wasm as we know it. It was originally for games and performance on the web.

At no point there was a conversation about "replacing js", but more like, "js can't do these stuff. let's have something else".

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IshKebab 145 days ago
> At no point there was a conversation about "replacing js"

There absolutely was. This famous talk was made even when it was still Asm.js:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

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miki_oomiri 145 days ago
Not gonna argue with "who said what".

All I can tell you with certainty is that the people who designed and funded webgl/asmjs/llvm efforts at Mozilla (Alon, Vlad, Brendan, …) clearly understood that wasm was a needed companion alongside JS (and its DOM&co bindings). Not a replacement. I was part of these conversations.

I understand why people would think it was a JS killer, but that's a naive way of looking at it.

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Dylan16807 145 days ago
That talk is intentionally silly and at the end is talking about replacing all binaries, not javascript in particular, and yes that does strongly change the meaning.
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