What is the point of Emscripten?

Lately I was writing a manual for building my development environment incase I need to build it again.

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I look at the platforms I want to target, and see Emscripten, for wasm32 and wasm64. Lately, I saw an article, saying that all major browsers have supported wasm64 besides safari, and I don't care about Mac users so I thought why don't I just target wasm64, I don't really want to think about going over 4GB anyway.

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The problem is, I really want to get to multi language language projects, and rust doesn't have an Emscripten backend for 64 bits. It has one for 32 bits only.

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That got me thinking, why am I even doing this, why should anyone run compute intensive stuff from a browser rather than just downloading a binary. I really feel like it doesn't really solve real problems.

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Most stuff that people ported to web via emscripten is disgustingly slow, and they have zero toolchain control unlike native development. I can't just build a standard library of my choice from source and use it. Neither can I just use another allocator. It is all a giant black box.

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I mean, android development is also annoying, but libraries like SDL just give you the wrappers normally, and the way you build stuff makes sense, you build C/C++ parts normally and just run another build on top of that with gradle and friends.

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