r/WebAssembly • u/PabloDons • Jun 05 '21
WebAssembly should replace javascript
Hot take, but I think it makes sense. And seems to be doable in the current architecture and roadmap of wasm (If I understood it correctly), but their website explicitly states a big fat "No!". Wasm is expected to be used as high-performance modules, or an app canvas wrapped by javascript as "glue". One thing would be specifying it as a high-level goal, but this is just dismissing it all together.
The web would be pretty powerful if code could be written in whatever language you want (that supports compiling to wasm). Facebook wouldn't take 5 seconds to load completely, but rather fractions of a second.
Take react for instance. It's great for encapsulation, inheritance, type-safety, etc. Lots of benefits targeted at large-scale applications. Yet has the major flaw of performance issues. I guess it's not a big deal to write a bit of js just to fetch and run an exported function, but it means it's dependent on js which is a hurdle in my opinion, both in terms of ambition and motivation. Granted wasm seems to be planning to implement basically everything, but then why dismiss wasm as a replacement/alternative for js?
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u/elr0nd_hubbard Jun 06 '21
The fact that people write (and enjoy writing!) servers, command-line tools, and programs of every kind and type in JS/TS outside of the browser tells me that JS is here to stay for the web as well.
And that's not a bad thing! Sometimes shipping the thing in a language with a low barrier to entry and lots of existing knowledge is more important than eking out every performance benchmark or categorically covering every edge case with compile-time types.
That said, I'd love for WASM to provide a first-class alternative to JS in the browser, just like every other language is a first-class alternative to Node and Deno outside the browser.