Re:Debugging WebAssembly with Modern Tools
by qwertycrackers on Thursday December 10, 2020 @05:32PM
(#25379701)
I'm coming at with from a similar place as you; I think it's really cool but the benefits are somewhat fringe for normal web apps.
I'm currently writing a SPA in WASM just because I want to play with trendy tech, and the biggest benefit I have observed is massive code size improvement. A similar app I wrote using React had an uncompressed bundle size of about 2 Mb (ouch), which gzipped down to 400 kb. The wasm competitor is about 150 kb and 90 kb gzipped, which is a pretty good code size savings, although still a little bloated. I also strongly prefer the Rust development experience over Typescript, even though TS was perfectly serviceable and the WASM-browser interface is still a little unpolished (but still quite capable). Overall my experience tells me WASM has a strong future but we are house on the bleeding edge of usability at the moment.
I'm currently writing a SPA in WASM just because I want to play with trendy tech, and the biggest benefit I have observed is massive code size improvement. A similar app I wrote using React had an uncompressed bundle size of about 2 Mb (ouch), which gzipped down to 400 kb. The wasm competitor is about 150 kb and 90 kb gzipped, which is a pretty good code size savings, although still a little bloated. I also strongly prefer the Rust development experience over Typescript, even though TS was perfectly serviceable and the WASM-browser interface is still a little unpolished (but still quite capable). Overall my experience tells me WASM has a strong future but we are house on the bleeding edge of usability at the moment.