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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

> WASM implies Rust or C++

Nope, there are lots of languages that compile to WASM. In fact, Kotlin compiles to WASM, and you get the best of both worlds, able to interop with the JVM, and compile to WASM (and C++/ObjC, and JS)

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Your comment makes me think how WASM will go through this hype phase where people will think is a panacea to build things for the browser.. Hype gold rush all over again, but applications built on native or even javascript ones in the web or Electron will perform better in most cases. Of course companies will think its great for them to have only one codebase for every platform, but applications built with Javascript or Typescript for the web, with eventual WASM module here and there will be a better fit, so it will be risky to try to cut expenses and development there.

WASM will be awesome to bring great tech that is only available in native platform to the web, like FFMPEG, or to accelerate some code that uses a lot of math. But i think that people that are going way down into this WASM rabbit hole will have a wake-up call pretty soon.

WASM will open some blue-seas for sure, but they are limited to some niche scenarios and using WASM for application development for the web, desktop and mobile wont be one of them.

I don't think of WASM as web specific, I think of it as a portable compiler IR format, and from an untrusted third party code, isolation standpoint, running code in WASM has nice security properties.

This is why you see it starting to be used for "serverless" deployments.

> This is why you see it starting to be used for "serverless" deployments.

For cloud like scenarios WASM probably will be a hit, given its safer and a good target for providers to let developers to create customized apps in any language they want.

Also there's centralized decision on which tech should be used. And this make the adoption of new tech much faster.

Sure its a portable IR, but is a very limited one and therefore it will be sub-optimal in a lot of scenarios compared to the traditional native applications.

In the web alone it will be sub-optimal to the state-of-the-art optimized javascript of today in a lot of cases, even having a much better performance in some special cases. And in the case of desktops, mobile, etc, this will make it even better for javascript applications, which will profit the most in this scenario, with hybrid apps (javascript + WASM).

Of course, the FAANG that control the platforms would love to limit more and have absolute control over the platform which will probably be the only native app allowed or that people will run. But the day WASM take the world and we are not allowed to run native applications anymore except the ones the walled gardens allow us to, will be a dark future compared to the freedom we once had.

Clean-room monopolized innovation and big tech mammoth's..

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