Maybe someone that's more familiar with wasm can enlighten me, but isn't this still extremely limited in the capabilities it exposes? With so many limitations in place, what are some example use-cases that this helps with? Am I being too negative and unrealistic? I don't know what kind of expectations I should have. I'm not writing this to bait responses.
It seems to be that until you get lower level network capabilities and some form of file system access, you're just too limited.
I do think JS is very limited for non-networked applications. If most of what you're doing is hitting APIs and displaying that data, it's great.
But if you're building an app that doesn't depend on the network, you find yourself way more limited in most cases. The solution for many people is to go for Electron, but that takes you completely out of the web sandbox.
I understand that it's incredibly challenging to get multiple vendors to agree on anything, and I'm sure we'll get to a good place eventually, but I guess I'm just feeling a bit frustrated with the state of things.
What does this initial release of wasm enable? I've heard that game developers are expected to be the initial target audience. Do we provide adequate APIs for storing game assets? As an example, I think the latest Doom game is 50GB.
I guess I'm a bit concerned that all of this incredible work will get done and released, but nobody will be able to make use of it? Is this a legitimate concern or am I being irrational? I guess I'd have a bit more peace of mind if there were some examples of concrete use-cases that are expected to be solved by this work. Maybe these use-case examples already exist and I haven't seen em? I'll admit I haven't looked around much.
This is a concern I've had with regular web APIs as well. Sometimes I'll read about a new spec that's being developed, but maybe due to my poor understanding or lack of knowledge, I'll end up confused as to the purpose of those APIs.
It seems to be that until you get lower level network capabilities and some form of file system access, you're just too limited.