It would be more plausibly practical if GHC could now target wasm, but this announcement is actually about being able to run the compiler itself in the browser.

It can target wasm, the point of the post is that it’s now mature enough to be able to build itself for wasm and run in a browser.

This is a show case of the wasm backend

GHC is built with GHC lol

Loading 50mb of WASM is a big tradeoff just to run code on a website.

Loading time is pretty rough, but it seems responsive enough after the initial load. Probably as fast or faster than downloading and installing GHC locally.

For comparison: the homepage of cnn.com right now is 33.37MB on my machine. 16.82MB of which is JavaScript.

I would assume that in the near future one can preload, cache, update selected WASM packages. I also imagine that sooner than that we can preload open models in the browser to run the natively instead of only invoking third parties (e.g. window.ai in the DOM)