Although I can agree in some respects... however, a browser gets you a LOT more than just a WASM platform... canvas + webgl can go a long way, but then why not get the reset of the rendering platform which gives you stylistic support of a hypertext/dom model that is well understood with cross platform engines for pretty much every platform out there.
Creating compiled applications that look halfway decent is REALLY hard with compiled UI toolkits, for the most part. And really easy for browser based toolkits. While I don't appreciate the additional bloat of Electron itself, it is a nice option. I would like to see something similar be available as a cross-platform baseline, auto-updated like chrome. Node + Carlo could be an option, which would at least use the platform installed Chrome.
In the end, something like Adobe's Air platform could be incredible, but run by a company that supported more modern JS, and rendering. My hope is that with MS changing Edge to use Blink's engine that something like this could evolve and be adopted by other platforms.
Re:Doom 3 in WebAssembly
by rafaelvasco on Thursday January 03, 2019 @04:07PM
(#18819284)
Agree completely. The true power of WebAssembly will be realized when it gets completely free from the Browser.
It will be, as long as we can stay away from the paradigm of Electron as the de facto runtime for Webassembly. Despite its name, Webassembly doesn't need to run in a browser, we can have executable WASM run in thinner native clients.