Sam Thorogood on Dev.to writes,
Why did I write this post? Emscripten is a wonderful tool, but it has a long history (for asm.js), and isn't perfect. I think it errs too much on the side of "magic", and many posts rave about how it's so easy to EM_ASM_ or use binding-fu, but this all comes at a cost, and can introduce huge amounts of inadvertent overhead—think copying huge memory buffers around because we're trying to make them immutable or easily exposed.
Every language that is being compiled to Web Assembly needs a runtime—whether it be Go, or Rust, or C/C++ as we have here. I don't believe that we'll ever really be able to directly import Web Assembly via ES2015 modules, at least not without changes on the JS side. But it behooves us to write the smallest one we possibly can.
I think we all see the potential of wasm, bit for many of us a lot of the other platforms that are now able to come to the web are completely alien to us, and we really need to learn those tools, improve the wasm developer experience and imo offer prebuilt libraries that 'traditional web devs' can just use.
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