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Comment by milesokeefe | Hacker News Reader

Not exactly, WebAssembly has no direct DOM access so if you want have your front end run in WebASM you’ll still need JavaScript to make anything work.

Personally I think that’s a good thing, I don’t want front ends to get any more obfuscated than they have gotten.

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Not really, minimal bridge only has to be written once and is reusable across any language that compiles to Web Assembly.

That minimal bridge is anywhere from 10x to 100x slower than pure JS right now.

https://github.com/rust-webplatform/rust-webplatform/issues/...

You can bridge it though. See https://github.com/rust-webplatform/rust-todomvc , rendered at http://rust-webplatform.github.io/rust-todomvc/

That said, I think there are better opportunities for wasm than trying to oust JavaScript; that's not really a stated goal of the wasm project.

>better opportunities for wasm than trying to oust JavaScript; that's not really a stated goal of the wasm project.

Yes, that's what the wasm guys say, however, what I think is that it will effectively displace Javascript. Not only that, the labor market implications for the current JS full stack developers and front-end developers will be interesting.

Its definitely meant to make javascript more capable. Currently while you can do some things with webaudio for example, with WASM you can use complex DSP, you can also build out valuable audio code that you want to keep locked down in binary format where someone getting your algorithm could do damage to your business but in the case of a webaudio DAW the code can't be run on the server.

I’d argue it’s intended to make the platform more capabale. JS is clearly part of the platform.

Really though, the point is that wasm’s goals aren’t somehow eliminating JavaScript, but complimenting it.

>the point is that wasm’s goals aren’t somehow eliminating JavaScript, but complimenting it

That may not be the goal of WASM's creators, but it will certainly be the goal of many of its implementers.

"Where we're going, we don't need a DOM."

Today, canvas and WebGL are enough, we don't need DOM.

Tomorrow, DOM access might actually exist.

but then we are kinda back in the realms of flash and why that was all so horrific

Yep, welcome to the future. Without having to deal with JavaScript.

it was only horrific because it had no ui libraries, also what was horrific is that it was a second class citizen.

ditching html and css is not obfuscation :P

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