I’ve been reading these articles for years, but I’ve yet to experience any practical use of webassembly outside of contrived demos. Where do people use all this stuff? Does anyone use it?
WebAssembly is generally most useful when you want to write high performance web applications using languages like C, C++ or Rust.
WebAssembly sits in the background quietly powering the web-based versions of products like Adobe Photoshop, AutoCAD, Figma, Canva, and likely others. By using Wasm components combined with other browser technologies such as HTML canvas and webGL, app performance and responsiveness can be improved.
WebAssembly also powers the Pyodide and webR projects, enabling Python and R code to run in a browser without a supporting computational server. Where I’ve seen this used most effectively so far is in teaching materials, particularly for teaching data science, where interactive R and Python examples can be embedded directly into teaching materials without the educator having to worry about the time or expense to deploy a powerful backend service to evaluate learner’s code.
If you used Zoom on the Web then you have used WebAssembly without knowing it. The same for a long list of other stuff, big and small, from parts of Wikipedia to games to many other things.
When you use something like the Video element on the Web then it's obvious - you see a video playing - but wasm is just a technical detail that you might not notice as a user. But it often makes things faster or easier to port or to develop, and it is used quite widely (though far less widely than JavaScript, for example).
WebAssembly is used in the real world and uses are very diverse. I recommend "An Empirical Study of Real-World WebAssembly Binaries". (The paper is from 2021, and it would be great to get an update, but I guess academia does not reward such work because it is not "novel" even if it is clearly valuable.)
Envoy proxy uses wasm filters, thus Istio uses wasm filters. Everyone who uses Istio in non-ambient-mesh uses them. They can write their own in a language of their choice.
Cloudflare workers use them for portability/v8 isolate compatibility/speed/isolation, Figma uses for the main editor, a bunch of Web3 stuff uses them for ???
