Use Cases

WebAssembly’s high-level goals define what WebAssembly aims to achieve, and in which order. How WebAssembly achieves its goals is documented for Web and non-Web platforms. The following is an unordered and incomplete list of applications/domains/computations that would benefit from WebAssembly and are being considered as use cases during the design of WebAssembly.

Inside the browser

• Better execution for languages and toolkits that are currently cross-compiled to the Web (C/C++, GWT, …).
• Image / video editing.
• Games:
  • Casual games that need to start quickly.
  • AAA games that have heavy assets.
  • Game portals (mixed-party/origin content).
• Peer-to-peer applications (games, collaborative editing, decentralized and centralized).
• Music applications (streaming, caching).
• Image recognition.
• Live video augmentation (e.g. putting hats on people’s heads).
• VR and augmented reality (very low latency).
• CAD applications.
• Scientific visualization and simulation.
• Interactive educational software, and news articles.
• Platform simulation / emulation (ARC, DOSBox, QEMU, MAME, …).
• Language interpreters and virtual machines.
• POSIX user-space environment, allowing porting of existing POSIX applications.
• Developer tooling (editors, compilers, debuggers, …).
• Remote desktop.
• VPN.
• Encryption.
• Local web server.
• Common NPAPI users, within the web’s security model and APIs.
• Fat client for enterprise applications (e.g. databases).

Outside the browser

• Game distribution service (portable and secure).
• Server-side compute of untrusted code.
• Server-side application.
• Hybrid native apps on mobile devices.
• Symmetric computations across multiple nodes

How WebAssembly can be used

• Entire code base in WebAssembly.
• Main frame in WebAssembly, but the UI is in JavaScript / HTML.
• Re-use existing code by targeting WebAssembly, embedded in a larger JavaScript / HTML application. This could be anything from simple helper libraries, to compute-oriented task offload.