this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Programming

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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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[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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