The State of WebAssembly 2021

I feel like the inclusion of WebAssembly SIMD in Chrome 91 is the biggest development to the ecosystem. But we now are coming up to the limits of the LCD approach to having a single abstraction for every device running a web browser ;)

WebNN API

https://www.w3.org/2020/Talks/mlws/nh_webnn.pdf

I feel the biggest issue is the tooling available, the overall experience is still pretty much DYI despite cargo and emscripten.

Additionally most don't care about GC, because workarounds exist and given the time it has been stuck in stage 1, it might never take come anyway.

Anyway most CPUs don't have GC hardware support.

Besides Bytecode Alliance, CNCF has accepted WasmEdge as a sandbox project. https://github.com/WasmEdge/WasmEdge