What have been the most interesting WebAssembly demo/application so far?

#discuss #webassembly

As Webassembly makes progress, have you seen any interesting applications of the technology, even just concept demos? Share them with us!

Oldest comments (23)

Max Ong Zong Bao • Jul 3 '19 • Edited

Ebay Bar Code Scanner

Ben Lovy • Jul 3 '19 • Edited

Google Earth is a solid proof of concept.

Also, sandspiel is pretty neat, implemented in Rust. His blog post about the project is a good read.

Ben Halpern • Jul 3 '19

Wow, absolutely! I feel like Google will always be able to flex in this way. Sandspiel is really cool too.

rhymes • Jul 3 '19 • Edited

Wow! I read the post about how they made Google Earth and how they've dealt with the different capabilities of WebAssembly powered browsers. Can't wait for multi threaded Wasm to come back to Firefox :D

I skimmed the Sandspiel post and it's absolutely impressive. It's a journey in software architecture, optimization, game design and more stuff. I'll have to read it again more closely. Love how he embodied the spirit of WebAssembly by structuring the code that needed to be in Rust with Rust and the code that was good enough in JS, in JS. Also loved the dig at Firestore, which isn't cheap :D

Thanks for the links!

Ben Lovy • Jul 3 '19

Agreed on both points, but especially the sandspiel post - truly an impressive recap! I like how well it demonstrates the use of wasm as one part of a complete system - I'd wager most wasm apps will look more or less like that as opposed to an all-or-nothing deal. The WebGL stuff is totally foreign to me too, but super cool to see how he was able to seamlessly integrate all these complex moving parts.

Daniel • Jul 4 '19

For more info about Google Earth and their migration to WebAssembly:

softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/...

Daniel Schulz • Jul 3 '19

Mozillas Arch Sculpture at the 2018 JSConf EU: hacks.mozilla.org/2018/06/babys-fi...

The Arch is a larger-than-life experience that uses 30,000 colored LEDs to create a canvas for light animations.
And you can take charge of this space. Using modules, you can create a light animation."

Alan Barr • Jul 3 '19 • Edited

Pyodide Python notebook in the browser is interesting. I keep hearing excitement from C# developers about Blazor and one day replacing JavaScript. Who knows if that day comes?

Ryan Smith • Jul 3 '19 • Edited

One that I always hear about is AutoCAD for the web. They were able to compile existing code from their 35-year old C++ application to WebAssembly. I think bringing existing resource-intensive desktop applications to the web is going to be a huge use case.
blogs.autodesk.com/autocad/autocad...