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Comment by jimmy1 | Hacker News Reader

> must be really telling something positive about this language and its community.

It's because it's the new shiny thing. This basically used to be a ruby on rails post-it board, then C# for a while, then Java when Java 8 Streams were announced, then Go, etc.

I am not saying it's a bad thing -- in fact I can't wait to go through that "write an OS in Rust" blog that was posted here earlier -- but no I don't think it's telling of anything quite yet.

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It's not just because it's shiny. Rust happens to (a) be a great fit for the parts of WebAssembly that have been implemented so far (partly because it doesn't need GC), and (b) have done a really good job of building WebAssembly tooling with nicer ergonomics than other languages.

WASM is the new and shiny also. I'm not even sure what to do with it ATM given that the DOM story still hasn't been figured out.

Even though the DOM story hasn't been figured out, firefox has recently done work to make WASM <-> JS calls performant. So now things like Yew will probably be usable from a performance standpoint[0]. But apart from the DOM, it's good for CPU intensive things[1].

[0] Yew: https://github.com/DenisKolodin/yew [1] Refactoring a CPU intensive JS thing: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/oxidizing-source-maps-with...

There is a DOM story: host bindings. It just isn't implemented yet.

However, that doesn't mean that you can't use it now. wasm-bindgen is essentially a polyfill for host bindings plus some other little things.

Some resources to check out if you want to learn more:

* Host bindings: https://github.com/WebAssembly/host-bindings/blob/master/pro...

* More info about web-sys (web-sys is like the raw libc for the web): https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/web-sys/index.html

* API documentation for web-sys: https://docs.rs/web-sys/0.3.2/web_sys/

* DOM hello world example: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/examples/dom.html

* A mini MS Paint style example: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/examples/paint.html

* An FM synth in WebAudio: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/examples/web-audio.h...

As a child raised on 80s 8-bit computers, and a fan of emulation, I love what WASM does for in-browser emulators. You can run an enormous amount of Apple II, Commodore 64, etc. software on archive.org, all compiled using emscripten.

You forgot Haskell..

And for a year or two it was Node.js.

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