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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.

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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.

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