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Comment by s3th | Hacker News Reader

We're working hard to make sure that WebAssembly is a first-class citizen in the open web platform in ways that other native execution environments didn't accomplish.

For example, it's a goal to have WebAssembly modules interopt with the ES6 module system, and as soon as GC is supported, you'll be able to access the DOM and the JavaScript context in WebAssembly [0]. Both of these are huge steps towards ensuring that wasm plays well with everything that's great about the web today.

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/Web.md

(Disclaimer: I'm a Google Chrome PM contributing to the WebAssembly project)

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> As soon as GC is supported, you'll be able to access the DOM and the JavaScript context in WebAssembly.

Do you have any anticipated timeline for this? For React, at least, we're eagerly looking forward to the opportunity to write at a lower level while maintaining the same JS-facing API.

We'll start tackling GC as soon as we finish the MVP [0]. No timeline yet, but we consider it essential to the high level goal of integrating well into the existing platform.

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/GC.md

Any chance python could be a first class citizen here, or are we looking at more compile-able languages?

Check out the last paragraph of "Is WebAssembly only for C/C++ Programmers?" in the FAQ [0]. The tl;dr is that you'll be able to port a Python interpreter (that is itself written in C) to WebAssembly from day 1, but a more robust solution that relies on WebAssembly GC will have to wait until after the MVP.

[0]: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#is-...

What are some use cases for WebAssembly in React? What source language might React use to generate the WebAssembly code?

Not sure yet. :) Some languages that are interesting include Swift, Rust, and OCaml, but we'll see where things go and how they work with WebAssembly.

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