WebAssembly technology was not supposed to be a mainstream thing. Idea of making high performance low level environment inside browser virual machine was somewhat quirky but promised a lot in the end. We could recompile any code from any language into more suitable low level instructions instead of using one more layer of Javascript. Good in theory. Practice is a bit rough. I personally don’t know any of popular framework that would use WebAssembly underneath as a runtime. There are many experimental projects and interesting ideas around it. Will WebAssembly live up to its promise and potential?
Here’s the talk from Steve Klubnik on this:
Things are developing pretty fast these days. Rust became a mainstream language. Originally developed as a replacement for C++, more on system side, than to be an application oriented language, Rust evolved into a mature ecosystem. Package managers and frameworks have been built and devs started looking at it as a replacement for more generic script languages. You can argue that statically typed language is not a replacement for, say, Python, and you will be right. But Rust still can be a good alternative to Python. Here’s a talk from Owen Synge why you should consider Rust. I found his arguments pretty compelling. One of them is a garbage collector implementation differences. Rust is using reference counting mechanism which does not require a global lock for the collector. In multi-process and threaded environment it’s a big advantage. Rust is indeed more performant.