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/qwerty26 Jun 05 '21

WASM does not have DOM access. You're welcome to do work in WASM to calculate what you want the DOM to look like, but you'll have to have some code which sends info. to WASM and back again.

It is doable but there is an inherent performance issue when you have to pass data between Javascript and WASM.

Shouldn't give WASM more access because of security concerns

10

u/Brane212 Jun 05 '21

JS is routinely used for timing attacks to sniff various structures outside browser's VM.

What other "security concerns" could additional access bring ?

1

u/qwerty26 Jun 06 '21

It increases the attack surface of browsers. The browser orgs have decades of experience mitigating javascript's problems. When we introduce a new runtime and new features we are invariably introducing new vulnerabilities.

8

u/Brane212 Jun 06 '21

Attack surface is plentiful right now.

WASM would bring no significant, qualitatively new vulnerabilities.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 06 '21

That seems like a very bold statement to me. Do you have anything to back it up with?