Browsertech Digest: People are actually using WebAssembly
It's true. WebAssembly hasn’t toppled web development on its head. Seven years into being able to build for the web in (theoretically) any language, most people building most things on the web are still using some flavor of JavaScript. The vast majority of web developers have never touched a Wasm compiler.
In fact, even the professional Wasm community is largely focused around use cases of Wasm out of the browser as a generic platform-independent bytecode.
I want to talk about the disparity between the perception of Wasm as overhyped tech among web developers with the fact that Wasm has become almost table stakes for a certain class of apps.
It used to be that “web development” meant developing applications that were delivered over hypertext. These were categorically different from desktop applications, in terms both of their capabilities and their architectures.
That discipline of software development still exists. News sites, blogs, e-commerce, and social media are inherently hypertext. The web frameworks have evolved, but this variety of web development is not radically different from building an e-commerce site in 2004.
