Ashley Williams Discusses the Future of WebAssembly at the WebAssembly Summit .

Williams commented on the results of a Twitter poll she conducted, in which she asked about reasons for choosing WebAssembly. The fact that WebAssembly is a compilation target for many languages came first, with the size and speed advantages promoted by WebAssembly coming second, and the remaining two options being at a far distance. Narrowing down on the majority which favored the multi-language compilation target, a subsequent survey singled out two primary motives. On the one hand, some developers mentioned that JavaScript did not satisfy their needs. On the other hand, other developers were attracted by the potential offered by WebAssembly to reuse existing libraries written in other languages.

Williams observed that the dissatisfaction of some developers with JavaScript may originate from the fact that JavaScript has outgrown the original use case it was designed to fulfill. The ubiquity of the web makes it an attractive distribution platform for applications, and this, in turn, pushes a large set of use cases and computations to the web.

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