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Discussion on: Why the heck is everyone talking about WebAssembly?

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Gopalakrishna Palem • Edited

Except for Game engines, WebAssembly is pretty much pointless, given the peer W3C standards.

  1. For any high-performance computation, you already have a WebSocket standard that can be used for offloading the computation to high-end servers.
  2. For Visuals, Sound and GPU you have WebGL, WebAudio and WebGPU standards (the last one is upcoming).
  3. For Edge computing, you have WebWorkers (if the device has browser) or other (more better) options in the form of Embedded languages (ERLANG, C etc.)

And then, even for game programming, no AAA-rated game targets WebAssembly. So, unless you are an indie who is using some OSS like Unity for game development, WebAssembly is pretty much useless in business environments.

Not to mention the architectural anti-patterns of mixing the business layer with the presentation layer, which goes back to the same problems of WCF and Java on Web.

To summarize, its pretty much hard to find a genuine real-world business use-case for WebAssembly. It is better to stick to other W3C standards.