alt Hacker NewsI love how WASM is the thing that finally blurred the line between Web and Native programming, formely two realms isolated from each other for a long time. This both develops better awareness of how the code is executed by the hardware, which JavaScript devs often lack, and also brings skilled folks from the Native platforms who seem to be not so against WASM as they were against JavaScript (and all other parts of the Web, really). Maybe this will bear fruit in that people will make more Native user interfaces again.
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I wanted to love it. As someone who hasn't done any web stuff since I was a child, I thought it'd amazing for it to be "just another platform".
I'm a bit disappointed though:
* There's still no way to do DOM manipulation. So then it's tempting to just grab a canvas and draw everything yourself, which of course wreaks on things like accessibility. I'm no fan of the web, but at least it comes with a somewhat agreed-upon way to display graphical stuff – it's a bit of a shame if we're all gonna just treat it like a surface for pixels.
* WASI still leaves something to be desired. Why can't I have raw sockets and file access and stuff, in a POSIX-like way? I understand that sandboxing is important, so this can all be on a per-request-basis, but still. This "just another platform" is still too far from just that.
* The amount of JS glue needed to actually load WASM stuff in the browser is annoying. The idea of needing a bunch of magic "bundlers" is sad.
Wasm still doesn't let you make native user interfaces, the UI is in the web browser. You can put native UI components into a React Native or Electron app though.