this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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Programming
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WASM’s biggest holdback is that it cannot directly access the DOM. Until then, JS will still have a prominent place in building anything rendered in a browser.
That's actually a myth and real world performance isn't affected by this. See this video from leptos creator which is one of the more popular wasm ui framework https://youtu.be/4KtotxNAwME?si=D_vWV1LPQI-C9j8G
The biggest issue is actually the size of the payload since you need to ship the entire app and language runtime.
It’s not a question of performance - it’s just the fact that you need to use JS to modify the DOM in WASM. Until there is access to the DOM from WASM, there simply will be a place for JS in nearly every web app and it’s not because it’s fast, it’s because there are still certain things just need to be done using JS.
My point is really nothing to do with performance and I agree with the video you’ve linked: WASM is fast enough today. Whenever you can truly stop using JavaScript, I’ll be the first in line. You can already use WASM and eliminate huge portions of JS - but for anything beyond a very simple UI, you always end up with something that needs to be called in JS.
I mean, I get what you're saying but with rust all that js code is auto generated and you can make a full app without writing a single line of js yourself.