The biggest hole in WASM right now is being able to DO anything really useful in it, natively. The only thing you can do natively right now is use the CPU. Can’t manipulate the DOM. Can’t access local storage or cookies or networking APIs, etc. You can call out to arbitrary JS code, but that’s it.
This is great for some of the big JS libraries that have very CPU-heavy workloads they can optimize in WASM and call to from JS. Like frequently parsing and re-parsing HTML. Or doing game physics calculations.
I haven’t heard word one about WHEN any of this will be available. Which is particularly troubling, given how long people have been begging for it.
Of course, none of this stops you from using WASM in the real world, to do quite a lot of things. You’re just gonna have to deal with JS interop, still, do do anything really useful.
I try to, when I have the time, but I don’t sweat it if I don’t, I just try to avoid forming too many opinions about the topic.
Also, a good chunk of the time I try, I get paywalled. Which I can usually bypass if I’m on PC, but that’s not really feasible on mobile.
Props to all the heroes copying the article into the post, or pointing out when the headline is misleading.