January 9, 2026
Holy grail or hot air?
What Happened to WebAssembly
WebAssembly: hype dream vs. quiet powerhouse — fans vs. “JS forever” crowd
TLDR: WebAssembly is alive and powering parts of major web apps, but it isn’t replacing whole sites. The community is split between dreamers who want “everything in WASM” and pragmatists sticking with JavaScript, with builders asking for multithreading and celebrating real speed gains where it counts.
The internet showed up to ask, “What happened to WebAssembly?” and the replies split into two camps with popcorn in hand. One side gushes about huge potential — a world where everything runs on one portable engine — while the other shrugs, noting today’s reality: WASM powers features inside apps like Godot games, Figma tools, StackBlitz web containers, Ruffle flash emulator, Squoosh image crunching, and Zellij plugins, but it’s not replacing whole websites.
Fans remind everyone WASM is basically a low-level “language” — more like instructions than magic — so speed depends on the engine. Builders chime in: one dev says using Rust-to-WASM gave “around a 4x” boost, but admits JavaScript’s toolchain is now so slick it’s hard to justify switching. The drama spikes when a commenter claims the “what happened” narrative doesn’t match their experience, while another keeps it simple and asks if WASM can transform JSX (that friendly React-style page syntax) right in the browser. Meanwhile, hopefuls chant, “Multithreading when?” and meme it as “islands of WASM in a sea of React.”
Verdict: not dead, not dethroning JavaScript — just quietly muscling key parts of the web, while the crowd argues whether it’s the holy grail or just a very handy power tool.
Key Points
- •WebAssembly is actively used in production for specific features and products (e.g., Godot, Squoosh.app, Zellij, Figma, Stackblitz, Ruffle).
- •The article frames WebAssembly as a language/bytecode; performance depends on runtimes and engines rather than the language itself.
- •Major websites are not broadly built entirely with WebAssembly-based frameworks, nor are most apps compiled directly to WebAssembly for portability.
- •WebAssembly’s design maps efficiently to modern hardware; it can be compiled or interpreted and achieve near‑native speeds in suitable scenarios.
- •WAT is the textual form of Wasm, closely mirroring the binary; developers can hand-write WAT, and the article provides a simple example and mentions a relevant practice course.