The potential of Kotlin/WASM

The potential of Kotlin/WASM
seb.deleuze.fr

It's been exciting to watch the development of the new K2 compiler and Frontend-IR format

Kotlin is no longer just a JVM language, but more like a frontend with targets that now span everything from JVM bytecode, JavaScript, native code with Kotlin Native, and WASM

I'm really excited to see what the future holds for Kotlin and WASM in particular

It would not really be very web like. It'd be more like Flash or a Java Applet. User extensions would all be broken.

This is a new thing coming people. Now that we have wasm, the native-app folks are super jazzed about not only switching programming langauges, but getting rid of HTML and the DOM. The plan goes: we're replacing structure markup & hypertext of webapps with just-a-bunch-of-pixels, big canvases, that are purely computational constructs. Declarative information is getting blown up by imperative processes; this is how native apps are having their revenge against webapps. I have yet to see how any of this actually empowers or helps users: it seems like a huge downgrade, done purely to give developers alternative options. Maybe the experiences really are vastly better, maybe what we make is categorically different once we have this tech! But I really have a hard time (given what creativity we've had & seeing how quickly bootcamp folks come in & get hacking on the DOM) believing the DOM is really so horrible that it justified de-internet-izing the web & that turning it into a motion picture machine is warranted (as anything more than early exploration).

The web starts with the HTML/DOM, and has been our computing world's greatest, most universal tower of Babel[1] that has held. I'm curious (and admittedly pretty terrified) to see who is happier/winners when we bring down the higher-level system, & treat it like a low level interface, like a big Canvas, like what was happening with Flash & Applets. Two other recent examples beyond Kotlin/Compose: Flutter/CanvasKit (which I commented on & got a reply from the lead about on these topics[2]), and Hixie's "Towards a Modern Web Stack"[3].

[1] https://unwindprotect.com/tower-of-babel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34695638

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980

[3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696

The amount of experience and knowledge that has gone into fixing edge cases like accessibility, viewports, cross-browser support, security, etc. makes any kind of 'pure wasm' app a nightmare to maintain.

What? The canvas is not new, you've been able to dump the DOM and make canvas-only UI for many years.

The "new thing" is just improved code sharing if you are making a canvas-y thing for multiple platforms. And letting people use their preferred language if not JavaScript.