I'd argue that's part of the interrogation. "We should use WebAssembly because Figma does and Figma is fast" is faulty logic. Are you making a product with the level of complexity of Figma? OK but are you really? Are you sure WebAssembly is what makes Figma fast? If so, what are they using WebAssembly for? Is there an overlap with what you're doing?
> WASM has enabled functionality on the web we could have only dreamed of 5 years ago
Like what? I ask the question genuinely. WebAssembly makes it dramatically easier to do a lot of performance-sensitive things but to my mind it doesn't actually enable a whole lot of new functionality. I don't mean to write off making things easier, it's a huge deal. But if anyone asserts that we absolutely must use WebAssembly for Project X I'd really want to dive into exactly why. "It's fast" is not a good enough answer.
WebAssembly doesn't provide any new functionality much in the same way cars did not when compared to horse-drawn carriages. You can argue that everything you can do with Wasm can be done with JavaScript, but often it involves significantly greater effort.
Where Wasm is a massive improvement:
* Ability to use existing C++/C/Rust code without a rewrite.
* Performance consistency through languages with manual memory-management and more straightforward performance characteristics.
* Performance of working with multithreaded code by using languages that can pass pointers and avoid message-passing overhead.
* This last point is somewhat unproven as it's related to my own personal work, so take it with a grain of salt! Wasm has unique properties that allow it to be augmented to run complex, seemingly unnetworked, code perfectly synchronized between computers with very little latency in the UX. I'm convinced it can eliminate a whole class of complex networking / sync issues. I first demonstrated the concept earlier this year with tanglesync.com, but I'm currently working on a follow-up.
Still waiting for those wonderful WebAssembly + WebGL games that can match Infinity Blade for iOS from 2010, the game Apple used to show off iOS GL ES 3.0 capabilities.
Or something better that citadel demo, beyond the asm.js port done by Mozzilla .
> WASM has enabled functionality on the web we could have only dreamed of 5 years ago
Like what? I ask the question genuinely. WebAssembly makes it dramatically easier to do a lot of performance-sensitive things but to my mind it doesn't actually enable a whole lot of new functionality. I don't mean to write off making things easier, it's a huge deal. But if anyone asserts that we absolutely must use WebAssembly for Project X I'd really want to dive into exactly why. "It's fast" is not a good enough answer.