Ask HN: Is WASM (WebAssembly) getting adoption in real use cases?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34565026

by pranay01 • 3 years ago

3 2 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I keep hearing how WASM is a big thing and can potentially change the way we write and deploy codes.

I understand that one big advantage is that WASM code can be understood by browsers directly like JavaScript and it should be useful.

I am more interested in the backend use cases of WASM on how it will be useful. There are discussions around this become default run time environment like JVM or also replace docker.

I am curious are there any real use cases here and have products started using this in scale. Or this is still a prototype/idea stage. What are the tangible advantages compared to current tools

vmarchaud• 3 years ago

Not specially something that you cannot do without WASM but at $WORK we are using a WASM build of Skia [0] to render canvas from nodejs.

Why use WASM ? Because we wanted to stay close to our stack (ie. calling wasm from nodejs). Do it work ? Yes, memory consumption is quite heavy though (each WASM module have its own heap that can quickly grow).

However we are looking to directly use Skia now and avoid the overhead of WASM so i think its a nice solution in the beginning but you might want to ditch it later on.

[0] https://github.com/google/skia/tree/main/modules/canvaskit

verdverm• 3 years ago

CUE has someone working on WASM to support writing code in any language, so it can be used and shipped without compilation in the scripting layer

https://github.com/cue-lang/cue/issues/2035

Ask HN: Is WASM (WebAssembly) getting adoption in real use cases?

Related Stories