My view of WebAssembly is that it's a much-needed compilation target in the browser that allows you to write client-side applications in languages other than JavaScript. It's basically democratizing the front-end language space, resulting in more choice for everyone in what language you want to use for web applications. This is a good thing. Different languages have different strengths and WebAssembly allows you to make use of 'the right tool for the right job' philosophy.
You mention that there's a whole new asset, the Wasm binary, that needs to be sent to the browser. Is this also not the case with JavaScript? The JS script source has to be sent to the browser yes? Isn't the only difference in the source code format, namely text vs binary? Or do I have this wrong? I'm a relative newcomer to web development so I may well be mistaken :)
My view of WebAssembly is that it's a much-needed compilation target in the browser that allows you to write client-side applications in languages other than JavaScript. It's basically democratizing the front-end language space, resulting in more choice for everyone in what language you want to use for web applications. This is a good thing. Different languages have different strengths and WebAssembly allows you to make use of 'the right tool for the right job' philosophy.
You mention that there's a whole new asset, the Wasm binary, that needs to be sent to the browser. Is this also not the case with JavaScript? The JS script source has to be sent to the browser yes? Isn't the only difference in the source code format, namely text vs binary? Or do I have this wrong? I'm a relative newcomer to web development so I may well be mistaken :)
Not just that. WASM is binary and already compiled to there's no parsing nor interpretation nor compilation steps to be had.