Also I think Godot's WASM outputs used to be 2-3x smaller in Godot 3 (though the C# one was bigger).

You can ship a JS game in kilobytes, although atop 30 million lines of Chromium that's cheating of course :) still good fun.

https://js13kgames.com/

Notch also made a bunch of 4kb Java (not JS) games back in the day, which is probably what got me into this stuff.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090108001738/http://www.mojang...

https://github.com/srv1n/kurpod/pkgs/container/kurpod-server

wasm version compiles to under a MB though!

The thing runs in a browser that has most of the stuff implemented to integrate with whatever system it runs on, and just needs to present.

It’s payload versus payload + runtime.

A 'fairer' comparison would be a optimized and compiled binary that dynamically links to the OS versus a WASM product (would be kilobytes-megabytes).

Or having the WASM app in a Chromium browser in Docker (would be gigabytes).

I realize wasm wasn't designed for embedded but it made me open my eyes to it's intricacies like minimum memory allocation, why not native 1 byte variables?

Chrome seems to be ~404MB installed on here; that is conspicuously missing from the comparisons here to Docker containers which do account for more or less the complete runtime.

[1] https://www.construct.net

Because ARM nodes save you a bit of money (they're cheaper but a bit slower, maybe you end up saving 20-30%) but the move isn't trivial for many tech stacks. When you try it you find you have some Python dependency with a C bit that doesn't have an arm wheel, or your browser automation can't run Chrome on those nodes (there isn't a linux/arm64 build of it). If you're using Go you can cross-compile, although it will likely fail without explicitly disabling cgo, and do you know what the consequences of that are?

Basically it very often ended up being more trouble than it was worth.

I found that many dependencies in the ecosystem (especially older ones) do not support GOARCH=wasm nor GOOS=js / GOOS=wasip1. I've had to fork and add support and then do go.mod replace directives. It can get messy.

Golang build tags make it awesome to have different implementations for different systems.

In the browser, it's all single threaded, so goroutines starve each other. I had to put in "breaths" for interactivity.

There's no local filesystem, so you have to figure out other solutions. Some dependencies use the filesystem as an implementation detail or try to shell out. The program will build, but will error at runtime.

That said, it is pretty sweet when it works. You can make WASM games with ebitengine [1] and it emits instructions for a WebGPU renderer; very efficient and many interactivity concerns are handled for you. The NTCharts demo page [2] combines Zig (Ghostty), WASM+Typescript+GLSL (Ghostty Web), and Golang (booba/ntcharts). The WASM size for the demos there is ~5MB each.

My goal is to make tools for terminal remoting and simplify bringing TUIs to the browser. [1] https://ebitengine.org

[2] https://nimblemarkets.github.io/ntcharts/demos/heatpicture-p... press 't' for kitty graphics

Meanwhile: Error - The following features required to run Godot projects on the Web are missing: WebGL2 - Check web browser configuration and hardware support

This is on Chrome 148.0.7778.96 (Official Build) (64-bit) on Fedora 44, 14900K, 4090 RTX, 128GB RAM

35MB WASM which relies on browser, which relies on drivers and OS, AND it doesn't work as advertised. I get the point, but point was mistaken.