> The lift here is astronomical, not to mention that companies just want to get a merch store up. No business person or product manager really cares about the "runtime."
You fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of WASM for web development. It is not another web app framework or programming language. It's a platform for building frameworks/DSLs.
Of course the "business person or product manager" doesn't care about the runtime. They also don't care about 99% of the Web APIs or how React was implemented. They don't have to, because that work was done by the people working on the runtime (or reactive framework). WASM is for the latter group.
Average webdev yesterday wrote PHP/HTML and JQuery.
Average webdev today writes React DSL (e.g. TSX) for a monstrous "runtime" hacked together in JS.
Average webdev tomorrow writes Python for a reasonably fast Python interpreter implemented in the browser with WASM [1] (and maybe written in Rust).
> Average webdev tomorrow writes Python for a reasonably fast Python interpreter implemented in the browser with WASM
Python is just as hand-wavy as Javascript, so I fail to see the win here. At least C/C++/Rust/Go give you some neat guarantees, but you lose all the velocity JS gives you. I mean, pyscript doesn't even support hot reloading out of the box, but yeah, I'm sure it's definitely the future. Besides, you could probably just write the interpreter in vanilla JS and it would be comparably fast (at least in Chrome), so WASM is completely superfluous.
> At least C/C++/Rust/Go give you some neat guarantees
Wow, imagine if you could compile these to WASM.
> Besides, you could probably just write the interpreter in vanilla JS and it would be comparably fast (at least in Chrome), so WASM is completely superfluous.
This one is going in the orange site bookmarks, lol.
> This one is going in the orange site bookmarks, lol.
I mean, benchmarks say the performance gains are from 0.2%-60% comparing vanilla JS to WASM given various browsers (keep in mind it's not even twice as fast even in synthetic benchmarks). So I guess you're right: if I built my next todo web app, I'd definitely want to change my entire workflow, write a custom purpose-built runtime, and transpile from Python to WASM to eek out that sweet sweet performance in Google Chrome.
You fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of WASM for web development. It is not another web app framework or programming language. It's a platform for building frameworks/DSLs.
Of course the "business person or product manager" doesn't care about the runtime. They also don't care about 99% of the Web APIs or how React was implemented. They don't have to, because that work was done by the people working on the runtime (or reactive framework). WASM is for the latter group.
Average webdev yesterday wrote PHP/HTML and JQuery.
Average webdev today writes React DSL (e.g. TSX) for a monstrous "runtime" hacked together in JS.
Average webdev tomorrow writes Python for a reasonably fast Python interpreter implemented in the browser with WASM [1] (and maybe written in Rust).
[1] - https://pyscript.net/