This. Scientific computing is not interested in running in web browsers.
As a former neuroscientist, I occasionally had connectivity analyses that would take 3 weeks to run. No way would I risk slowing it down with anything unnecessary. A 25% slowdown for using VMs in the browser would mean milliseconds for users and days for me.
R's "shiny" is a counterpoint. Obviously something that takes a week to run isn't going on the web. But a complex model and visualization that can be incrementally updated quickly and in real time? That would be cool.
+1 for this! For large programs -- server side Julia, but having browser native Julia via WebAssembly would make visualization and interactive analysis for data science fantastic. Performance of running large GUI applications and libraries would be much faster since WebAssembly could take advantage of the huge amount of work done for optimizing JS by tiered interpretation/JIT'ing.
I agree there's value on the visualization side. Most scientists still do a poor job of sharing results to the public and other scientists (other than by printed images in your article...)
As a former neuroscientist, I occasionally had connectivity analyses that would take 3 weeks to run. No way would I risk slowing it down with anything unnecessary. A 25% slowdown for using VMs in the browser would mean milliseconds for users and days for me.