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What's stopping WebAssembly from effectively replacing JavaScript?

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popcar2@programming.dev
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programming@programming.dev
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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?

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lemmyvore@feddit.nl
-7 points

Even if WASM gets some amazing feature, like super-fast DOM manipulation, it would still be used via API from JavaScript. WASM is a subset of JavaScript that mainly consists of low level operations. It’s not exactly nice for writing code. It’s like assembler in this respect — very fast, very efficient, but we still tend to prefer a higher level language.

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xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
9 points

How is WebAssembly a subset of JavaScript? Aren’t you confusing it with asm.js?

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LufyCZ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
2 points

He meant it as “wasm will be invoked by javascript” and not the other way around.

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AnarchoYeasty@beehaw.org
6 points

Ok but no one is talking about hand writing wasm. You write wasm with a language, such as rust, which already has great web frameworks such as yew (which replaces react) as well as leptos (which replaces solid.js). Leptos is already faster than react vue and svelte

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coltorl@programming.dev
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I don’t know what you mean by WASM being a subset of javascript (maybe you mean AssemblyScript?) You can still program in higher level languages like C and have it compile into WASM as one would compile C to assembly.

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