JEjerf·Feb 14, 2025
"why is Go compelling as a source language for WASM?"
As near as I can tell, the answer is that it is supported, and has been working now for many versions.
See the short list of "production" languages here: https://github.com/appcypher/awesome-wasm-langs And read the sections carefully; you might think your $FAVORITE_LANG must be in the "stable for production usage" section given how big it is but it's full of a lot of languages with small communities. The really big names are mostly in the "unstable" category.
I can verify that I've toyed with some WASM support in a few languages now, and it is often not even functional, or takes vast effort to set up far above and beyond the official tutorials. You'll see a steady stream of stories on HN over the years about how this language or that language supports it, but in many cases those should
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be understood not so much as a commitment of support, but as a snapshot, that in that moment, it worked, but it may not work next week.
It's still true that Go produces big binaries. Official WASM garbage collection support may shrink that at some point though it'll still be larger than other languages for the goroutine runtime support. Not only is a bare minimum "Hello World" a couple of megabytes off the top, the Go WASM executables grow quickly as you add libraries. It rapidly becomes usable only for situations where you are guaranteed very high bandwidth for all users. Such situations exist, but is certainly a major limitation. (Though at least it does cache well, if you are even slightly careful with caching.)
So, to summarize, I'd say that it's not that Go is awesome and amazing, but that vast swathes of the competition are still quite bad.