I did 5 game jams in Web assembly last year and found it quite painful overall.
Emscripten is very bloated, but it's the best option from what I can tell.
I lost a whole day of a 3 day game jam to a weird Emscripten bug. It ended up being that adding a member to a class blew up the whole thing.
The alternative (and the only option, if you want it to be as light as possible) is to do the bindings yourself, which is fun, depending on how much your concept of fun involves JavaScript, and having half your code in a different programming language.
I'm told the Rust situation is pretty nice, although my attempt didn't get anywhere — apparently I tried to use it in exactly the opposite way that it was intended.
I had a pretty nice time with Odin. Someone put raylib wasm bindings for Odin on GitHub, and it worked really well for me.
(Odin syntax is really nice, but you don't realize just how nice, until you port your game to another language!)
Zig was cool, but a bit pedantic for a jam, and a bit unstable (kept finding out of date docs). Didn't see much in the way of game libs, but I was able to ship a Zig game with WASM-4.
I ended up switching to TS, which I'm not happy with, but since you (usually) need JS anyway, the benefit of having a single language, and a reliable toolchain, is very high, especially under time pressure. The "my language is nice" benefits do not in my experience outweigh the rest of the pain.
Emscripten is very bloated, but it's the best option from what I can tell.
I lost a whole day of a 3 day game jam to a weird Emscripten bug. It ended up being that adding a member to a class blew up the whole thing.
The alternative (and the only option, if you want it to be as light as possible) is to do the bindings yourself, which is fun, depending on how much your concept of fun involves JavaScript, and having half your code in a different programming language.
I'm told the Rust situation is pretty nice, although my attempt didn't get anywhere — apparently I tried to use it in exactly the opposite way that it was intended.
I had a pretty nice time with Odin. Someone put raylib wasm bindings for Odin on GitHub, and it worked really well for me.
(Odin syntax is really nice, but you don't realize just how nice, until you port your game to another language!)
Zig was cool, but a bit pedantic for a jam, and a bit unstable (kept finding out of date docs). Didn't see much in the way of game libs, but I was able to ship a Zig game with WASM-4.
I ended up switching to TS, which I'm not happy with, but since you (usually) need JS anyway, the benefit of having a single language, and a reliable toolchain, is very high, especially under time pressure. The "my language is nice" benefits do not in my experience outweigh the rest of the pain.