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cedwsyesterday at 9:39 PM3 repliesview on HN

But then you need two things instead of one. It should be made possible to build WASM-only SPAs. The north star of browser developers should be to deprecate JS runtimes the same way they did Flash.


Replies

austin-cheneyyesterday at 10:19 PM

That is never going to happen until you create your own browser with a fork of the WASM spec. People have been asking for this for about a decade. The WASM team knows this but WASM wants to focus on its mission of being a universal compile target without distraction of the completely unrelated mission of being a JavaScript replacement.

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bonestamp2yesterday at 10:00 PM

I agree with the first part, but getting rid of JS entirely means that if you want to augment some HTML with one line of javascript you have to build a WASM binary to do it?

I see good use cases for building entirely in html/JS and also building entirely in WASM.

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brokencodeyesterday at 10:18 PM

You can use a framework that abstracts all the WASM to JS communication for DOM access. There are many such framework already.

The only issue is that there’s a performance cost. Not sure how significant it is for typical applications, but it definitely exists.

It’d be nice to have direct DOM access, but if the performance is not a significant problem, then I can see the rationale for not putting in the major amount of work work it’d take to do this.

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