Where are they now? You won't believe her new look!
On every WebAssembly discussion, there is inevitably one comment (often near the top) asking what happened.
It seems to have been advertised as a world-changing advancement. Was it just oversold? Was it another JVM applet scenario, doomed to fail?
I’d like to tackle this in a weirdly roundabout way because I think these sorts of questions make a few misplaced assumptions that are critical to clarify.
# In The Real World
Of course, WebAssembly does see real-world usage. Let’s list some examples!
For many of these, WebAssembly is critical to either their entire product or a major feature.
But I think this alone is not very convincing. We don’t yet see major websites entirely built with webassembly-based frameworks. We’re not building our applications directly to WebAssembly for maximum portability. But why not?
To answer this, we need a good mental model for what WebAssembly is. This will help us qualify where it is most impactful and the limitations we’re up against.
# What Is WebAssembly
... continue reading