When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

Post by thaumasiotes » Mon, Jul 28, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

diffuse_l wrote: post #54

thaumasiotes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I asked a number of times on HN why wasm was good when java applets, exactly the same thing, were bad. There was a vague feeling that java applets were insecure and that this would somehow not be an issue for wasm. It's not just applets; we also had Flash, which was a huge success until it was suddenly killed. As far as I can tell, the difference between java applets and Flash is that you, the user, have to install j…

Flash was a security nightmare, with multiple vulnerabilities discovered regularly. It was eventually killed because Apple decided it won't support it on the iPhone.

Post by wffurr » Tue, Jul 29, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

ifwinterco wrote: post #194

sfvisser wrote: post #3

We use WASM quite a bit for embedding a ton of Rust code with very company specific domain code into our web frontend. Pretty cool, because now your backend and frontend can share all kinds of logic without endless network calls. But it’s safe to say that the interaction layer between the two is extremely painful. We have nicely modeled type-safe code in both the Rust and TypeScript world and an extremely janky layer…

The entire DOM API is very coupled to JS, it's all designed with JS in mind, any new and future proposed changes are thought about solely through the lens of JS. If they introduced a WASM API it would perpetually be a few months/years behind the JS one, any new features would have to be implemented in both etc. I can see why it's not happened (edit) And yes, I think the intention of WASM was either heavy processing,…