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Comment by chacham15 | Hacker News Reader

I'll be excited about WebAssembly when it can manipulate DOM. Until then, it feels mostly like a thought experiment in that the number of people that it makes sense to use right now is miniscule.

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Check out Rust’s wasm-bindgen - https://github.com/rustwasm/wasm-bindgen if ya haven’t already.

Right now it you call into JS to interact with the DOM but when the host bindings proposal sees fruit it’ll replace the JS shims with direct DOM manipulation!

It isn’t clear how they will allow safe access to the DOM without GC. Maybe they’ll take an approach like Microsoft did with UWP and use reference counting?

Would be interesting if it would be possible to take the Rust approach and guarantee at parse/compilation time that the DOM interactions are safe without runtime overhead. Probably a terrible idea for mobile devices though...

That would only work if it isn’t shared with unsafe code.

The possibility of WebAssembly becoming tangled with complicated web browsers worries me.

Whatever DOM manipulation there may be in the future, I hope there'll be no tight coupling with DOM, GC or anything else.

If tight coupling can be avoided, WebAssembly could become lingua franca of binary formats also outside web.

For things like architecture agnostic plugins, extensions and high performance light weight "scripting" support.

I think the point is to integrate WebAssembly with JavaScript objects in general, not the DOM API in particular. Nothing to do with web browsers, everything to do with JavaScript.

It's called the "host bindings" proposal because the proposal is to create bindings to the host environemnt; for a browser that's the DOM, for for any other host, it could be other things. It's not tightly coupled to them.

> It's not tightly coupled to them.

Hopefully it'll stay that way.

Dependencies on DOM or Javascript would be devastating for WebAssembly use outside web browsers.

Everyone[1] who works on wasm cares about the non-browser use-case, so I think you can sleep easy here.

1: Okay so, what I really mean is, "I spend a lot of time talking to people working on WebAssembly and they've all expressed that to me but of course I hvaen't talked to literally every single last person".

Same, I started looking into WASM yesterday, and was disappointed to find out you can't do DOM manipulation as that was my use case.

From my brief research https://github.com/WebAssembly/host-bindings is the repository to watch for progress.

Why would you want to do that? DOM manipulation is what makes JS slow, not JS itself.

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