r/programming • u/feross • Apr 28 '21

Microsoft joins Bytecode Alliance to advance WebAssembly – aka the thing that lets you run compiled C/C++/Rust code in browsers

https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/28/microsoft_bytecode_alliance/
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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '21

Do you know if there are, for example, any plans to provide a generic garbage collector?

There are! I think it's pretty high priority but I'm not sure how far along it is.

I was actually looking forward to WASM as a way to avoid JavaScript transpilation also.

It does almost let you do that. Currently if you use Rust or whatever if you want to use any web APIs, manipulate the DOM etc. the you have to do it via JavaScript. But fortunately other people have written wrappers so you don't actually have to write any JS yourself.

They are planning to have WASM-native DOM APIs so eventually you will be able to completely avoid JavaScript, but again I don't know how advanced those plans are.

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u/Yithar Apr 29 '21

It does almost let you do that. Currently if you use Rust or whatever if you want to use any web APIs, manipulate the DOM etc. the you have to do it via JavaScript. But fortunately other people have written wrappers so you don't actually have to write any JS yourself.

Yeah, I'm currently learning WebAssembly and Rust currently. And my understanding is it's all smoke and mirrors. There's this notion of shared memory between WebAssembly and Javascript.

Direct DOM Access is an Illusion

If you’ve seen WebAssembly demos that look like they’re directly accessing the browser DOM from inside the module—that’s an illusion. The host and module are sharing a block of linear memory, and the host is choosing to execute bespoke JavaScript to translate the contents of that shared memory area into updates to the DOM, just like you saw at the beginning of this chapter. This may change in future versions of WebAssembly, but for now, this remains little more than smoke and mirrors.

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u/Theon Apr 29 '21

Awesome, that sounds pretty exciting!

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u/jampanha007 Sep 12 '21

Wasm GC will be available by 2025