The State of WebAssembly 2022

WebAssembly is great as a developer, but it’s bothering me as a user that some websites require it for what looks to me like basic functionality.<p>The last one to bite me is Linode’s login: I can’t even login to my account to adjust a DNS setting without WebAssembly. That’s a problem because the browser I use, Firefox on PowerPC 64 (a current production CPU, not an old Mac) does not support it.<p>Yes, I can and have found workarounds, and I do have a variety of machines around that include AMD64 CPUs. It’s still an annoyance for no good reason that I can see.<p>As for the linked article, I’m not surprised to see Rust rising there because in some quick tests I did, everything worked as advertised with minimal friction.

I wish I could somehow ship a website as a single wasm file. Currently there&#x27;s quite a bit of HTML&#x2F;JS ceremony involved in order to execute a wasm file, but I&#x27;d rather be able to serve up an &quot;index.wasm&quot; and be done with it. Is there any movement towards this?

As long as they don&#x27;t let WebAssembly have raw access to the host filesystem, they&#x27;ll do well. &quot;No access&quot; is the best access choice for the default.<p>As adoption ramps up, the pressure to make filesystem access &quot;easier&quot; will increase. I just hope they hold it off, as isolation is the key feature of the platform.

&gt; I do wonder whether some respondents are incorrectly identifying AssemblyScript as JavaScript?<p>Perhaps we should include HTML and CSS in the list of languages to choose from next year! :P<p>I picked JavaScript thinking of AssemblyScript as a tool (not a language) to use JavaScript (with types) as a language compiled to WebAssembly. Maybe the results are not accurate.<p>I also use Wasm for web (the largest category of use so far) and would not use a JavaScript engine inside Wasm to talk to plain JavaScript in a browser (I don&#x27;t think any web developer would hehe).<p>Perhaps the survey should have an option to choose<p>&quot;JavaScript running in a JavaScript engine inside WebAssembly&quot;,<p>and<p>&quot;JavaScript compiled to WebAssembly&quot;,<p>to make the results clear as to which &quot;JavaScript&quot; people are using.<p>Does a JavaScript engine inside WebAssembly even count as a &quot;WebAssembly language&quot;? Or is that C++ and Rust actually?<p>Does running a browser in WebAssembly make HTML and CSS WebAssembly languages too?<p>I think that NEAR users just use the SDK, I don&#x27;t think the users chose JS specifically for it to be in Wasm.

Without interface types to unify passing strings around or more complex handles to resources. WASM is going to be rough on the serverside.<p>I still have not found a consistent way to construct a sqlite connection, pass it to wasm (language agnostic) and then return and close it.

Blazor&#x2F;dotnet is the framework using WASM. C# is the language.

Props to Colin on the survey. It&#x27;s always super useful to have more insights on where the market is going.<p>I&#x27;m super happy to learn that Wasmer (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wasmer.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wasmer.io</a>) is the most popular runtime (regarding most people having heard of it). But I would like to cheer all the other runtimes for their awesome work, it&#x27;s always good for the ecosystem to have a healthy amount of competition on the runtime space :)

What is a use case for running a javascript vm in webassembly? Why not run javascript in the browser itself? Is it for server-side webassembly stuff?

1. what&#x27;s the functional programming story - immutable data structures, garbage collection?<p>2. WASM&#x27;s best use seems to be to cross-compile C++ GUI apps in a browser (like Unity engine). Ok, but it&#x27;s not platform native, so will this feel like weird Java desktop GUIs all over again? The best apps are native<p>3. Web apps are I&#x2F;O bound. How does wasm help?

&gt; JavaScript cannot be compiled to WebAssembly<p>Wait, what? Why? Is WASM not Turing-complete?

Can someone point out a known web page&#x2F;service that uses WebAssembly?

Kinda surprised by the survey results, I wonder what it is about the rust community that they prefer it so much or perhaps the data is biased.<p>I would really expect languages that typically implement server side APIs to be most interested. But the python&#x2F;Ruby&#x2F;go people I guess aren’t that into it

Where is the .NET &#x2F; C# in the data? :(

it looks like most developers not interested in mem64 feature. I can&#x27;t really understand this thing.<p>Ladies, Gentlemen and all non binaries, current vm runtimes have 32 bit adressing and therefore you can have at most 4gb memory for your webasm application. I think it should be top priority to make it 64bit