Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

WASM has been at an inflection point for 5 years. Where are we at with garbage collection and DOM access?

> garbage collection

The draft WASM garbage collection proposal is partially implemented in Chromium, you can try it by enabling the enable-experimental-webassembly-features feature flag.

> DOM access

WebAssembly will never have direct access to the DOM, but at least with Rust the wasm-bindgen+web_sys crates make interacting with the DOM as simple as it is from JavaScript.

> WebAssembly will never have direct access to the DOM

I haven’t been paying much attention to WASM proposals for the last few years, but I thought that direct DOM access (avoiding JavaScript trampolining) was one of the driving goals of the reference type, interface type and garbage collection proposals. https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16 mentions “call Web APIs (passing primitives or DOM/GC/Web API objects) directly from WebAssembly without calling through JavaScript”, and WASM’s high level goals document <https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/main/HighLevelGoa...> lists “access browser functionality through the same Web APIs that are accessible to JavaScript” (not “through JavaScript”, but “through the same APIs”). Am I misunderstanding things?

Assuming the GC proposal eventually reaches general availability, do you think the approach of the wasm-bindgen+web_sys crates you mention could serve as a model for garbage-collected languages wishing to serve as a replacement for JavaScript?

I know the original intention of WASM was to peacefully coexist with JavaScript, not replace it, but one can dream.

This is the question I want answered more than anything. If WASM can get these, there's no doubt that it will completely reshape the future of web development.

yep was my thoughts too, WASM solves some problems well. But it isn't and can't replace general containers like Docker does, for some specific workloads sure but not a general solution. And yeah i don't quite think everyone talking about WASM understands its not just 'faster javascript' but a totally different world where you have to for example, BYO GC (or manage memory yourself if you like!).

GC is the job of the language, Rust doesn't need it

It does if it wants to interoperate with JS, unless you want to pin all memory when it's in the other runtime.

DOM access? why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com