Rust and WebAssembly in 2019

In my opinion the major benefit of WASM over Javascript is that it allows different runtimes to be used in browsers.

Python for example has the pyodide project, which works quite well. But its download sizes are totally ridiculous. Which may not matter for certain applications, and even then, there should be a way to host and cache such runtimes for multiple applications or websites.

The learning curve is enormous - since coming from like Unity and Flash, so much is done for you... I mean, one _can_ write their own shader code and physics and things, but it's not at all required in order to make impressive content. Even in JS, Three.JS and friends typically take care of the heavy lifting and deciding to get closer to the metal on both fronts (CPU and GPU)- and in a new language (for me), is a bit daunting.

Anyway - I figured a good way to push myself to learn more productively is to livestream while I'm coding and figuring stuff out. Forces some accountability and might help others too.

So far I've only done two sessions and about to do my third. The goal is to build a WebGL renderer from scratch with nothing but Rust (I had a Typescript project that was after the same goal - so there's going to be a fair amount of straight conversion, but it was never totally finished and some things can be improved even if they would theoretically translate 1:1)

Live Stream URL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGKhwtFOUlzj4VILDU0efkQ/liv...

Playlist URL: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkzdeKCVtKYshqmgngLSq...

If you join, please remember - the whole point is that I don't know what I'm doing (yet) and I actually _want_ to struggle in order to learn, rather than have solutions spoon-fed to me.

I think there will ultimately be at the very least some general functions here which can be useful abstractions over web_sys/js_sys/etc. At least I hope so!

Lastly - schedule is irregular, so best way to know when it's live is to subscribe and rely on youtube notifications ;)

You should contribute this knowledge: https://github.com/WebAssembly/proposals/issues/16

>developers, [...], tend to be deathly afraid of touching the DOM

I truly have never seen this. In fact, I'd say I often see a rather careless culture of doing DOM manipulation here and there because it solves an immediate problem, albeit by short-circuiting the abstractions that may be in place and are now a bit more fragile.

I am writing JS in the entire stack at the moment and I am mostly happy with it. I don't think that ability will go away but I look forward to the day where I can do the same in Rust or F# or whatever. And it doesn't seem unlikely to me that one day we will see wasm becoming the foundation in browsers, with JS running on top of it like any other language.

I'm not a web platform person, but I have coded some wasm application as a part of my undergraduate course work, and it is really annoying to use javascript just because rust code cannot be initialized without this BASIC of XXI century.

Outdated unsafe language with outdated unsafe API for DOM access on top of modern language with an ability to design strict, safe and elegant APIs. One need not to be a guru of JS to get access to DOM and to initialize wasm-module, and to write the majority of code in rust, but all this javascript stuff feels like a fifth wheel for a cart: maybe it doesn't hurt much, but it is a dead weight at least.

I mean, I'm not a web platform person, and it is far far away from my day to day work, so maybe I see it all wrong, but I believe that javascript is doomed, like any other fifth wheel. It will last, maybe decade or even more, but it is doomed.