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Comment by pohl | Hacker News Reader

It can through a thin bridge.

Plus first class DOM support for wasm is coming at some point in the future, so I'd imagine any properly supported library could implement it once it is finalized.

I'm not sure I want this. I use WASM as a compilation target, but I rally enjoy the simplicity of the platform and how all connections from and to the Javascript world have to be explicit. Allowing more transparent access to the DOM would diminish this highly defined interface.

The DOM is unrelated to Javascript.

Sure, but it's still part of the outside world, so it's still opening a lot of extra interface surface to the platform.

Wasm is specified in two layers; wasm itself and then the api the host provides. All of the "external surface" stuff is in the host, not in wasm itself, so wasm for another host doesn't get larger.

so how mature is this tech? is this really feasible? writing browser client code in rust?

The biggest holdout is non-Edge IE https://caniuse.com/#search=wasm

The story with Rust compiling to it is still younger; it works well at the moment, but is very fiddly. The early adopters and enthusiasts are working on making it all smoother. So for most people, it's still a bit young. Just depends on your temperament.

> The biggest holdout is non-Edge IE

IE is discontinued. IE11, which was released back in 2013, only gets security-related updates. It's on life support.

IE11 part of Windows 10 which EOLs in 2020 (mainstream) or 2025 (extended).

we still have 7.6% IE11 ecommerce traffic which converts very well (US, home remodeling).

it does appear to be declining ~0.2% per month, but it's a long way off from dead :(

7.6% isn't considered dead?

Actively doing something that predictably results in 7.6% less traffic to your profit generating website seems quite the questionable business decision.

How much money are you spending on dealing with IE11 bugs? My estimate from my last job is more than that 7% brings in.

Assuming IE11 users are otherwise representative of the customer base, multiply your total web based revenue by 7.6%. (If this assumption is wrong, then just check your reports to get the correct number.) If, for example, the business in question makes $10M yearly revenue, your estimate has 7 entire devs working exclusively on IE11 support fulltime, year round.

That is one fancy as fuck ecommerce site to be that reliant on features in modern browsers that lack automated transcompilation/shim generating tooling.

Are there actually IE11 bugs at a noticeably higher rate than bugs (or intentional deprecations) in other browsers? I thought we were just talking about a lack of new features that are present in Edge.

(If you were talking about IE5 or IE6 I'd understand the argument.)

most ie11 bugs that are relevant/annoying are around its flexbox impl. specifically equal height boxes via min-height and such. maybe some other fancy css animation or 3d transform stuff, but these are not terribly critical and can degrade without much impact.

thankfully, js and dom bugs are either rare or well-known and have lightweight polyfills.

would you find it acceptable if 1 of every 13 customers was unable to use your ecommerce site after you paid good money to acquire him/her via ads?

7.6% is a huge number. we dont even start discussions until traffic is < 2% (and also a huge pain in the ass to support). IE11 is not actually that terrible.

7.6% is huge,indeed.

7.6% can be absolutely HUGE. I have to support Samsung "The Internet" version 2.1.... and that's about 1% of traffic. But the amount that that still brings in in a single month is enough to pay a developers yearly salary.

Unfortunately not everyone stops using a project as soon as it is discontinued.

The problem is that MS won't port Edge to Win7.

Why is that? Latest versions of Chrome and Firefox work fine on Windows 7 , so they have real competition in this area.

Same reasons that IE versions only support certain versions of Windows:

- they want to be able to switch to newer APIs when the underlying OS adds them (though in Edge's case it's more likely it was written from the ground up using newer APIs)

- they quite possibly want to use "you can get the new browser only if you upgrade" as a carrot for OS upgrades (they explicitly did with IE, I haven't seen anything explicit for Edge but it wouldn't surprise me if they're still taking that approach)

Still used by some enterprise customers...

Is it possible to compile to plain javascript for IE11?

If you can write frontend code in typescript or elm, why not rust indeed?

Those transpile to JS though, not Web Assembly, don't they?

Javascript and Web Assembly are expected to run on the same engine, if I'm not mistaken.

I think stewed was announced about 8 months ago.

stewed -> stdweb

Thanks, autocorrect.

Yesterday, I learned that the correct term for that is “autoincorrect” thanks to HN.

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