A silly thing I wanted to try and check is how bloated and/or feasible would it be to use the Qt for WebAssembly for running a simple widgets application on the web browser.

The result was surprising as compared to the equivalent desktop version, the webasm “executable” takes 15MB (4.7MB gzip-compressed) while the windows desktop app takes up to 66MB between executable and dependency DLLs, with the added benefit of HTTP gzip compression happening transparently for the client.

Check the sample widgets application here.