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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]

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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] 14 points 1 year ago

Replacing costs expertise, time, and money. Nobody wants to invest that for (to them) insignificant or even pointless reasons.

If you're using tooling, a framework, a library - each of those makes a switch more risky, costly, or impossible.

JavaScript works with the DOM. Why would you want to implement a separate WASM component that you have to interface with? JavaScript is good enough. Interfacing only brings problems with it.

When you use JS you are doing it right - because there is no other way to interface with the DOM. Anything else is built on top. How would you interface with WASM? Manually? Library? Framework? What programming do you use to compile to WASM with? How do you analyze and debug WASM when it executes in a compiled WASM-binary format?

The use case for WASM is performance, efficiency on CPU-bound operations. If CPU-bound performance is not a concern for you, or JS is good enough, there's little reason to use WASM. Other reasons are even more niche.