WASM standalone runtimes are mostly fine, but WASM in the browser is not great. No direct access to any web APIs (this often really hurts when shuffling data to/from WebGPU). Multithreading via WebWorkers is a complete pain to setup. No zero-copy APIs for streaming data in/out. Little paper cuts, but they all add up...
Memory management is pain. If you want to optimize, you're forced to 4k pages. Runtimes are fragmented. Wasi is a mess. Async and threading is awkward. Whenever you need to integrate with hardware you need platform specific adapters.
In practice, whenever you need more than a singlethreaded app with http/serial port, the "run everywhere" breaks.
Don't get me wrong I love WASM but we're not there yet
Kindly give us performant access to the DOM, pretty-please! WITHOUT any JS glue code.
WASM is called WEB assembly but it can't access the Web API's without paying tax to the JS tyrant in between.
> Kindly give us performant access to the DOM, pretty-please! WITHOUT any JS glue code.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/making-webassembly-a-first...
WASM standalone runtimes are mostly fine, but WASM in the browser is not great. No direct access to any web APIs (this often really hurts when shuffling data to/from WebGPU). Multithreading via WebWorkers is a complete pain to setup. No zero-copy APIs for streaming data in/out. Little paper cuts, but they all add up...
Memory management is pain. If you want to optimize, you're forced to 4k pages. Runtimes are fragmented. Wasi is a mess. Async and threading is awkward. Whenever you need to integrate with hardware you need platform specific adapters.
In practice, whenever you need more than a singlethreaded app with http/serial port, the "run everywhere" breaks.
Don't get me wrong I love WASM but we're not there yet
Not the previous poster, but immatures: Needing to compile down to one enormous program, with no possible code sharing. The async story is not good.
Wasm components & wasi have a lot of promise here. Until now though browsers have been ignoring all this; Firefox just started taking a more active interest. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/making-webassembly-a-first...