HN Explorer

Is web assembly going to be huge?

1 points by Pigo ↗ HN
After watching some talks at the Google conference on web assembly, I'm blown away with what can be done with it. AutoCAD already ported their entire application to the web, natively. This is the first language to be supported by every major browser since JavaScript. Should I become an expert at this, or wait to see? I'm curious what you guys who have seen things come and go really think. It's got to be bigger than Silverlight, right?

https://youtu.be/BnYq7JapeDA

3 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 31.6 ms ] thread
Eridrus
Bigger than Silverlight? Sure.

Will it enable new products? Definitely.

Will it transform how most web apps are built? Not any time soon.

But if this excites you, there are definitely going to be companies who are going to start using it, in the recent HN hiring thread you can find that both Figma & Adobe are using it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16967543

I think this technology isn't going to die the way Silverlight did - Moore's law is dead and we can't just keep throwing cores at the problem because we care about power consumption, but most applications don't really do a lot of client-side processing, so this is going to remain a niche technology for quite a while.

Pigo
That's pretty much what I was wanting to know. I figure since most web apps aren't doing a whole lot, there wouldn't be call for it for awhile. But once word finally gets around to the followers, there might be a bunch of need for it.

I guess I'm trying to figure out if I need to learn something like Rust in order to keep up with what's coming down the road. I've spent so many years doing client side, I don't have as much experience with lower level languages.

I've read that some benchmarks have shown it to be light weight, but there's a lot about it that is still just out of my experience. I do find it exciting because of how powerful it is potentially. I just don't want to invest to much into it if it's not going anywhere besides a few big companies I'll never work for. I do a lot of work for companies that build actual apps, not just user friendly sites. So it seems reasonable that they could be interested in it.