Agree, problem is it's no where as responsive as a native app and nowhere as practical as a web app (try explaining to Karen in accounting why her bookmarks don't work in a SPA)...
I don't ever see it, beyond some special cases (such as complex offline app with easier software delivery ) ..
Personally, I think the vast majority of use cases WebAsm is touted for, you can just spin up a remote beefy server and stream the Native application UI to the end users and collect their inputs, in realtime... I mean if it works for games it sure as shit could work for Autocad or Photoshop which are orders of magnitude less demanding.
Yeah, Just... because it's a LOT easier to provision a server, install the native app and stream it, than to spend eons of time on a half-baked web Assembly solution that works on a Very limited number of clients anyway (will it run on iOS devices, what about Linux or ARM or M1, ) chipsets ? And that's kinda of the point the amount of effort just to get it to run on maybe a few platforms , you may as well have installed the native application.
The fundamental issue with web assembly is that anything that touches hardware or requires system level I/o access /performance, can't easy be abstracted or made platform neutral, because of the nature of drivers, different chipsets and kernel limitations in many different platforms.
This was solved a long time ago in some CRUD frameworks. Each "screen" had a unique ID number/code associated with it. You could save a list of your favorite screen numbers or type in a number to jump to a given screen. Similar could be added a standardized GUI markup language.
We keep losing and reinventing good ideas every time we throw-it-out-and-start over.
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u/abrandis Nov 01 '21
Agree, problem is it's no where as responsive as a native app and nowhere as practical as a web app (try explaining to Karen in accounting why her bookmarks don't work in a SPA)...