Top Languages for WebAssembly Development: Rust, C++, Blazor, Go - and JavaScript?

This year's "State of WebAssembly" report has been published by Colin Eberhardt (CTO at the U.K.-based software consultancy Scott Logic). Hundreds of people were surveyed for the report, notes this article by Visual Studio Magazine. Published by B2B media company 1105 Media, the magazine notes that Eberhardt's survey included some good news for Rust - and for Microsoft's free open source framework Blazor (for building web apps using C# and HTML):This year, like last year, Rust was found to be the most frequently used and most desired programming language for WebAssembly development.... "Rust once again comes out on top, with 45 percent saying they use it frequently or sometimes," Eberhardt said. "WebAssembly and Rust do have quite a close relationship, most WebAssembly runtimes are written in Rust, as are the various platforms based on wasm. It also enjoys some of the best tooling, so this result doesn't come as a big surprise." While Rust usage and desirability has continued to climb, the Blazor web-dev framework is coming on strong in the report, which treats Blazor as a programming language, though it's not. On that desirability scale, Blazor climbed from sixth spot in 2021 to fourth this year among seven "programming languages" [based on] percentage of respondents who use a given language 'frequently,' or 'sometimes' [for WebAssembly development] compared to last year. Eberhardt said, "Rust has had a modest rise in desirability, but the biggest climber is Blazor, with Go following just behind." Commenting on another graphic that shows which language people most want to use for WebAssembly development, Eberhardt said, "This shows that Rust usage has climbed steadily, but the biggest climbers are Blazor and Python. While you can now compile WebAssembly from a variety of languages (including C, #C, and C++), the report also found that JavaScript has somehow become a viable WebAssembly language - sort of, and even though JavaScript itself can't be compiled to WebAssembly...There's a cunning workaround for this challenge; rather than compiling JS to Wasm, you can instead compile a JavaScript engine to WebAssembly then use that to execute your code. This is actually much more practical than you might think.

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