Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

Personal anecdote: I like building programming environments- sandboxes for playing with unusual languages. My target audience is people who are interested in programming and generally people who are very computer literate.

I spent about 3 years working on a complete development toolchain for a fantasy game console- compilers, profilers, documentation, examples- the works. It was spread around, and has hundreds of stars on github. Problem: you need to have a java compiler on your system to install and work with the tools. Number of people who developed programs using these tools aside from me: close to zero.

More recently, I built a browser-based IDE for another obscure game console. I made a complete toolchain, wrote docs, loads of examples, etc. This time, though, you could share your programs with a hyperlink, and there was no installation required. You could easily remix other people's programs from a public computer. The difference was huge. Dozens of other people wrote hundreds of programs using this system over a matter of months.

If you're making a project you want to share with other people, a web browser removes friction to a degree which cannot be underestimated. Believe me, I _hate_ working with broken, incompatible and terribly designed browser tech, but removing those barriers to entry is invaluable.

Does WebAssembly address either of those points?

1. Web code is portable. The Java dream of “write once, run anywhere” is alive on the web. All you need to run a web app is a device with a browser. No need for a specific CPU architecture or operating system.

2. Web code is accessible. Just click a link and BAM. No need to download anything, no need to install anything, no need to worry about where to put something you might not want later. The web is the lowest friction platform (for users/customers) yet created. Even better, it’s easy to access web data from anywhere in the world on any device: I can read my web email on my grandma’s iPad or on the library’s computer or on a 10-year-old backup laptop, without worrying about whether I’ll have the data I need.

3. Web code is mostly safe. Anything that runs in a webpage is theoretically sandboxed away from harming other webpages or user data stored locally, and web users have come to expect that clicking arbitrary links won’t harm their computers. Untrusted blobs of compiled C code are a completely different story.

4. Web products can very easily be kept up-to-date for all users. This is double-edged for customers, because often website feature changes make later versions more confusing or less effective than earlier versions (cf. most Google product changes from 2008–present). For developers though, it dramatically simplifies support, because every customer can be presumed to be running the latest software version.

The big question is, what do you mean by “everything”? I don’t think everything is being put on the web, or should be. For example, professional “content creation” software is not going to be put on the web anytime in the next few years, because the initial barrier to entry is small in comparison to the required time investment to learn and use the software, and because such applications need hardware access and fine-grained control over compute resources.