Comment by shevy-java

People use wasm for things that need wasm. My use case is my cross-platform game engine, because running both natively and in the browser was a priority for me. It is a wonderful tool and it is a truly magical feeling to see my native games running in the browser. But 99% of web developers are developing ordinary websites, so they don't need it. That's not an indictment of wasm.

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, …)

> Anyone using WebAssembly yet?

Yes, tons. Obviously not all, but large parts of these are WASM: https://itch.io/games/platform-web

Tools like Figma are only performant because of WASM.

I use it extensively in my OSS work (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) mostly around:

1. creating plugins that get executed in the browser to render files like Parquet, PSD, TIFF, SQLite, EPS, ZIP, TGZ, GIS related files and many more, where C libraries are almost always the reference implementations. There are almost a hundred supported file formats, most of which are supported through WASM

2. creating plugins that get executed in the server to generate your own endpoint or middleware while being sure you can't start exfiltrating data (which can be other people's files, and other sensitive stuff)

3. in the workflow engine to enable people to run their own sandboxed scripts without giving those a blank check to go crazy

I use a wasm xxhash implementation that is 40x faster than the fastest JavaScript version I can find. Drop in replacement. Call overhead is minimal, could be better with stringref if that ever gets available. Also some other audio analysis stuff in wasm I've been using is 400x faster than the JavaScript implementation but admittedly I just went straight to wasm rather than try to optimize the js in that case.

Sure, here's a Rust/WASM procedural skybox generator I threw together the other day, and is much, much faster at 16k renders then Javascript. https://tkte.ch/night-sky/

I'm writing a point and click adventure game, and for that I've built a dialogue editor that uses a local text-to-speech model to turn speech into audio that runs in WASM (or WebGPU if it's available).

From what I can tell WASM is mostly being used to run big libraries from other languages in web apps. That's not a particularly common thing to need, so it's not commonly used. That doesn't mean it's moving too slowly.

wasm isn't meant to supersede html/css/js (unfortunately) and it's regularly used for high performance applications in the browser, web-based cad software, figma, youtube (i think they use wasm for codec fallback when support is spotty) etc

there is also games, stuff to do with video (ffmpeg built for wasm), ml applications (mlc), in fact it's currently impossible to use wasm w/o js to load the wasm binary

as a result, the web stack is a bit upside down now, w/o the seemingly "low level" and "high performance" parts over the slow bits (javascript)

I saw a few web apps that use Rust crates for physics. I guess they must be using wasm?

WebAssembly is a virtual ISA, not a replacement for HTML and CSS. It was also never meant to kill Javascript (which is actually a pretty nice language if you stick to the 'good parts' via Typescript and linting), but at most as an alternative or complement to JS, and as that WASM works really well.

Figma