> it needs to be capable of delivering software that executes efficiently or else it is regresssion to barbarism by a thousand cuts.
WebAssembly executes efficiently, it keeps its overhead within a small multiple of natively compiled binaries which is totally par for the course for any JIT-compiled intermediate code. You can write slow and inefficient code in any language, but Rust makes it a bit easier to do things the efficient way.
Yeah, that's why I remain optimistic about the browser's future. My ranting was mainly about JavaScript itself.
We are already seeing real world web apps using WASM. (What I have seen is indeed mostly Rust, but in theory there are lots of other languages that can already, or will be able to, play in that same sandbox.)
The other fun thing about WASM is that there are already a bunch of ways to run it on the server (including "at the edge"). That makes it really easy to chop apps up into pieces that run in the browser, or run elsewhere.
WebAssembly executes efficiently, it keeps its overhead within a small multiple of natively compiled binaries which is totally par for the course for any JIT-compiled intermediate code. You can write slow and inefficient code in any language, but Rust makes it a bit easier to do things the efficient way.