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:
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Faster than JavaScript
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Has a smaller file size
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Can be compiled to from pretty much any programming language
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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?
Nothing is stopping them. Have you seen Leptos? https://github.com/leptos-rs/leptos
JS have momentum, a lot of it.
So I gotta have to break out the xkcd comic again? Cause I will
On the subject of dom manipulation from wasm I highly recommend this video https://youtu.be/4KtotxNAwME. It’s from leptos author, one of the more popular wasm framework. The TLDR is that modifying the dom isn’t the bottleneck for wasm.
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IIRC a startup tried to exactly that… It’s wasn’t any faster and is actually harder to develop.
EDIT:
Sorry ignore these videos. I don’t remember which YouTube video it is. But more importantly Rust + WASM got really better than JS these days.
The video is essentially saying the exact opposite of what you are saying. It’s showing leptos to be much faster than react and I know primeagen doesn’t think rust is harder develop.
My bad. I can’t find the actually video but there exits a startup that shutdown because Rust/WASM performance wasn’t any better on top of that it’s was harder to develop with Rust. But as my edit to my previous comment shows things got better for Rust. It’s no longer the case.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=461735zrjzY
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