alt Hacker NewsIsn’t the whole reason why people want DOM access is so that the JavaScript side doesn’t have any meat to it and they can write their entire web app in Rust/Go/Swift/etc compiled to webasm without performance concerns?
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leptons • yesterday at 8:14 PM
> without performance concerns?
WASM isn't going to magically make the DOM go faster. DOM will still be just as slow as it is with Javascript driving it.
WASM is great for heavy-lifting, like implementing FFMPEG in the browser. DOM is still going to be something people (questionably) complain about even if WASM had direct access to it. And WASM isn't only used in the browser, it's also running back-end workloads too where there is no DOM, so a lot of use cases for WASM are already not using DOM at all.
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Spoiler: there will be performance concerns.
The bottleneck is in the DOM operations themselves, not javascript. This is the reason virtual-dom approaches exist: it is faster to operate on an intermediate representation in JS than the DOM itself, where even reading an attribute might be costly.