Unlocking the Potential of WasmGC: Is it Ready for Production Use?

WebAssembly garbage collection, or WasmGC, has been a hot topic in the development world recently. But is it ready for prime time? I spoke with experts in the field to get the inside scoop on whether WasmGC is ready for production use.

Is WasmGC ready for production use?

I asked Steiner about using the WasmGC extension in production apps and he noted that “WasmGC is a standardized proposal (Phase 5 in the process), with implementations in three browsers and the feature shipping in Chrome and in Firefox.” For Safari, he said, the extension has also been merged into WebKit, but “we don’t know yet in what version of Safari it will ultimately ship.” Furthermore, “support for WasmGC is feature-detectable, which means sites and apps like Google Sheets can use a progressive enhancement approach: On browsers that support WasmGC, the new version is loaded, and on other browsers without support, the existing legacy version will do.”

The performance potential of languages like Java over JavaScript is a key motivation for WasmGC, but obviously there’s also the enormous range of available functionality and styles among garbage-collected platforms. The possibility for moving custom code into Wasm, and thereby making it universally deployable, including to the browser, is there.

More broadly, one can’t help but wonder about the possibility of opening up the browser to other languages beyond JavaScript, which could spark a real sea-change to the software industry. It’s possible that loosening JavaScript’s monopoly on the browser will instigate a renaissance of creativity in programming languages.