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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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

From my experience JS is primarily used to manipulate the DOM. I haven't looked into it, but if you're correct that WASM cannot manipulate the DOM then your question, to me, is tantamount to "Why aren't people using forks to eat soup?".

I would love a staticly-typed, compiled language to come along and replace JS. If anyone is aware of how I can write Rust in place of JS, please let me know. For now, I suffer/enjoy JS.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are quite a few web frontend frameworks for rust now that are reasonably mature. Though you might still find a few rough edges they are usable for projects now.

All of these can work without you needing to write any JS code. Though there is JS glue code involved, it is generated and you don't need to worry about it.

But the JS eco system is still quite large and hard to completely avoid.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There's Typescript, it's as close as you can get.

[–] dneaves 2 points 1 year ago

For transpiled-to-JS languages: Elm, Purescript, Typescript

I personally use Elm. Really helps remove all the JS funny business, without really having to type it (mostly)

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

You can absolutely modify the dom, you just need to go through a thin js glue layer between the dom and wasm