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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

You can already do that today in C, C++, D, Rust, Java and .NET.

I just wait for someone bored enough to bring Flash back.

Is this right? (Disclaimer: I'm about halfway through the Rust book, so I'm just a bit above useless when it comes to Rust) but my understanding was that since WASM can't do DOM manipulation, you still need JS and something like Emscripten to call WASM code.

The data and business logic of your code can be written in a WASM-targeting language, but I don't think you could make a React/Vue/Angular-esque UI library (or even a jQuery clone) purely in Rust.

While this is technically true, we have libraries (js-sys and web-sys) as well as tools (wasm-pack and wasm-bindgen) that handle creating that JS for you; you don't have to write any of it yourself. Additionally, they're implemented as polyfills for the eventual way to do this kind of thing without the JS, so once that lands in wasm proper, your code won't need to change, and things will just get faster.

On current WebAssembly version you still need to expose canvas or WebGL entry points to Rust code.

However WebAssembly is not stuck in MVP v1.0, there is ongoing work to expose more of the underlying features to WebAssembly, like the DOM references proposal.

Check Haxe and OpenFL. It can compile to JS/HTML5.

MOAI had the ability to target WebAssembly, and that was about as Flash in the 21st Century as you could want ..

With what? I look periodically and I never find anything.

Qt has an experimental WebAssembly backend, already discussed at least twice on Qt's developer blog.

Microsoft is busy pushing Blazor for .NET, and Unity is working on a 2D WebAssembly game engine already demoed multiple conferences.

C and C++ can make use of Emscripten and even use SDL, POSIX subset and OpenGL mapped into browser APIs.

D's LLVM based compiler, ldc, can target WebAssembly. Thus you can also write the logic in D, and do some mapping into browser APIs like canvas and WebGL.

Unreal can also target WebAssembly.

There is TeaVM for Java.

Go compiler supports cross compiling for WebAssembly now.

So plenty of information around.

Do any of those generate web apps that are accessible and browser-friendly? I am quite aware of the fact that you can run desktop apps in a web window. Will have to investigate Blazer and Qt.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by "browser-friendly"?

I would assume you actually meant "accessible and mobile-friendly", in which case the answer to that is generally "nothing does that". You need frameworks or libraries (not languages or compilers) if you want something that just does it for you.

Investigating Blazor now. It's very rough around the edges but is no less accessible and browser-friendly than React and friends.

Well, the original comment was about bringing Flash back and Flash isn't exactly mobile friendly.

Actually what many are unaware of is that for a couple of years Adobe still had Flash for mobile devices via an AOT compiler to native code, as means to address iOS as target.

Qt works really well with WebAssembly. However, you lose accessibility features and the browser's native text search won't work (as expected).

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