I am sad about WASM. It was a promise for epic greatness.

It has failed to deliver that - so much is clear now. You rarely see any awesome success story shown with regard to WASM nowadays. What happened to the old promises? "Electron will be SUPER fast thanks to WASM" or "use any language, WASM unifies it all for the larger browser ecosystem".

It feels as if WASM is on a step towards exctinction. Sure, it is mentioned, it is used, but let's be honest - only few people really use it. And that won't change either.

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sippeangelo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just recently I've compiled my side-project Rust game engine to WASM and it runs beautifully in the browser, as well as SSH2 to have a fully featured SSH implementation in the browser over a websocket transport.

It can obviously do amazing things, but the expectation for it to do replace webdev frontend code was always a huge misconception. Though recent developments have made DOM access without a JavaScript translation layer possible, so that might change!

I'd say the hype is still very much alive.

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purplesyringa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There used to be hype about Wasm, now it's a technology as any other. It's still used, and used a lot; it just doesn't get focused on as much.

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thomasmg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well there is Google Sheets, Microsoft Office, Figma, and some other heavier web apps.

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bbkane 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Looks like you're getting down voted, but the folks at Mozilla seem like they agree and are working towards making WASM more first class in the browser: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/making-webassembly-a-first...

	▲	flohofwoe an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That's specifically about string-marshalling overhead, which is only a problem when trying to talk to the DOM from the WASM side (which arguably is a silly idea to begin with, but to each their own I guess).

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flohofwoe an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The only failure of WASM is that it was overhyped beyond all reason. It's "just another" virtual instruction set, and for that it turned out pretty great. It's supported by Clang and by all browsers. That's already enough to make the whole idea work.

You don't hear much about it because for the people using it, web+wasm is "just another porting target", like Windows, macOS or Linux. WASM has become 'normal' and that's a good thing.

The main risk these days for WASM is feature creep, the spec is getting bloated with optional features (garbage collection etc...).