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What's stopping WebAssembly from effectively replacing JavaScript? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been wondering about this for a while and haven't really found a great answer for it. From what I understand, WASM is:

Faster than JavaScript
Has a smaller file size
Can be compiled to from pretty much any programming language
Can be used outside of the browser easier thanks to WASI

So why aren't most websites starting to try replacing (most) JS with WASM now that it's supported by every major browser? The most compelling argument I heard is that WASM can't manipulate the DOM and a lot of people don't want to deal with gluing JS code to it, but aside from that, is there something I'm missing?

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[+] [email protected] -6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Even if WASM gets some amazing feature, like super-fast DOM manipulation, it would still be used via API from JavaScript. WASM is a subset of JavaScript that mainly consists of low level operations. It's not exactly nice for writing code. It's like assembler in this respect — very fast, very efficient, but we still tend to prefer a higher level language.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is WebAssembly a subset of JavaScript? Aren't you confusing it with asm.js?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

He meant it as "wasm will be invoked by javascript" and not the other way around.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t know what you mean by WASM being a subset of javascript (maybe you mean AssemblyScript?) You can still program in higher level languages like C and have it compile into WASM as one would compile C to assembly.