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

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Pascal Fautré

One of the big downside of the current node/npm ecosystem is maintainability.
Don't touch at a frontend SPA project for 6 months and I dare you to be able to make it build again.
Even if you have a package lock file, it will just not build nor run anymore.

Same thing about upgrading, there is no elegant way to upgrade the dependencies without breaking everything.

The lack of a really standard library like you could find in Golang gave place to thousands of "< 100 lines of code" libraries of very heterogeneous quality.

Even a quite small frontend project ends up with a thousand dependencies with almost the same amount of different authors and with NPM telling you some of them have critical security.

added 1067 packages from 800 contributors and audited 7442 packages in 204.795s
found 74 vulnerabilities (6 low, 55 moderate, 13 high)

Golang or C++ project I wrote 3 years ago still compile and run as intended.
If I can write a web app in Go, using something like Vugu (vugu.org), I won't hesitate for a second.