Comment by stkdump | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stkdump | Hacker News Reader

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I never thought that it would be a promising approach to build entire web apps using wasm. You don't just have to make it possible to interact with the DOM. You also have to have the right high level language to do this kind of DOM interaction and application logic. JS isn't bad for that purpose and it would probably take a lot to find something that is much better (which compiles to WASM instead of js, like ts and svelte do).

The only real avenue for js-free web applications would be to completely abandon the browser rendering path and have everything render into a canvas. There are experiments to use UI toolkits designed for the desktop. But even that I see more of a niche solution and unlikely to become very widely used. HTML/css/js have become the lingua franca of UI development and they are taking over desktop applications as well. Why should that trend reverse?

> completely abandon the browser rendering path and have everything render into a canvas

Yeah, go ahead and trash the little bit of accessibility we still have. <canvas> by itself already asks webdevs to shit on people with visual disabilities. But getting rid of the DOM (for vague reasons) would really nail the coffin of these pesky blind users. After all, why should they be able to use anything on the internet?

This, and AI making webdevs consider to obfuscate things for scraping reasons, and Microsoft Recall making devs play with the idea of obfuscating OS-level access to their (privacy-sensitive) apps, which in essence would also trash accessibility, are the new nightmares that will haunt me for the next few years.

Unfortunately this is how Flutter web apps work.

> You also have to have the right high level language to do this kind of DOM interaction and application logic.

That just means you personally like JS. In my opinion many languages are better than it.

Maybe that's not the dominant mindset anymore, but I for one would love to use a language that's actually built for functional/reactive programming instead of inventing half-baked JavaScript dialects for that purpose. Elm was a language in that spirit, but it never felt complete.

You can probably build something in PureScript.

Gone are the days it used to show up routinely in sites like HN, another proof how the language adoption cycles go.

Makes me sad that PureScript doesn't have more adoption, not that I'm surprised. It's orders of magnitude better than Elm and even improves upon Haskell in some meaningful ways (row polymorphism).

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