Programming

17313 readers

246 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [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.