Hands-on WebAssembly
Most of my early excitement for WASM circled around “Hey, I can finally use a decent language on the web” but since then I have grown to love TypeScript, so a lot of that early excitement has been tempered.I have done a number of experiments with Go’s WASM target, one of the earliest and silliest porting Go’s “Otto” JavaScript runtime to WASM, so you can much less efficiently run ES3 JavaScript in a browser.I have also been working on porting a number of tools I currently have that run server side with web frontends to pure WASM. I have had mixed success here however and have found interacting with web elements and JavaScript from Go an awkward, non statically validated, frustrating experience of trial-and-error that somewhat undermines the joy of a statically typed language. On top of everything, Go’s .wasm files are frustratingly large, “Hello World” starting at 1mb and growing quickly from there.All that said though, it is pretty magical seeing something written as a CLI tool running in a browser with minimal changes.