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When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

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Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#71

Post by tpm »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #50
apatheticonion wrote: post #41

The web is a platform that has so much unrealized potential that is absolutely wasted. Wasm is the perfect example of this - it has the potential to revolutionize web (and desktop GUI) development but it hasn't progressed beyond niche single threaded use cases in basically 10 years.

Give me one thing that your theoretical WASM can "revolutionize". Aside from more efficient covert crypto mining on shady sites.

With access to DOM it could run with no (or just very little) js, no ts-to-js transpiler, no web-framework-of-the-month wobbly frontends perpetually reinventing the wheel. One could use a sane language for the frontend. That would be quite the revolution.

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#72

Post by croes »

adastra22 wrote: post #43
apatheticonion wrote: post #41

The web is a platform that has so much unrealized potential that is absolutely wasted. Wasm is the perfect example of this - it has the potential to revolutionize web (and desktop GUI) development but it hasn't progressed beyond niche single threaded use cases in basically 10 years.

It should never have been web assembly. WASM is the fulfillment of the dream that started with Java VM in the 90’s but never got realized. A performant, truly universal virtual machine for write-once, run anywhere deployment. The web part is a distraction IMHO.

But the blocking of ad, tracking and miner scripts gets more complicated with WASM

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#73

Post by croes »

detaro wrote: post #55
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…

I don't think "exactly the same thing" is accurate. And WASM has put more effort into sandboxing, both in the design (very limited interfaces outside the sandbox) and implementations (partially because we've just gotten a lot better at that as an industry).

But now you can do more in the browser than back then with Java applets.

Crypto miners weren’t a thing for Java applets

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#74

Post by 0x696C6961 »

renox wrote: post #65
adastra22 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should never have been web assembly. WASM is the fulfillment of the dream that started with Java VM in the 90’s but never got realized. A performant, truly universal virtual machine for write-once, run anywhere deployment. The web part is a distraction IMHO.

"Dream", well until you think about i18n and a11y..

What does a compiler target have to do with accessibility?

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#75

Post by nikanj »

secondcoming wrote: post #46
adastra22 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should never have been web assembly. WASM is the fulfillment of the dream that started with Java VM in the 90’s but never got realized. A performant, truly universal virtual machine for write-once, run anywhere deployment. The web part is a distraction IMHO.

Why did Java fail though, and why would wasm succeed when the underlying philosophy is the same?

Every few months Sun / Oracle would release a new update requiring new incantations in the manifest files. If you didn't constantly release patched versions of your applet, your software stopped working.

Javascript from 20 years ago tends to run just fine in a contemporary browser.

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#76

Post by unrealhoang »

3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #50
apatheticonion wrote: post #41

The web is a platform that has so much unrealized potential that is absolutely wasted. Wasm is the perfect example of this - it has the potential to revolutionize web (and desktop GUI) development but it hasn't progressed beyond niche single threaded use cases in basically 10 years.

Give me one thing that your theoretical WASM can "revolutionize". Aside from more efficient covert crypto mining on shady sites.

People are already appreciate the accessibility to low level native libraries like duckdb, sqlite, imagemagick, ffmpeg… allowed by wasm. Or high performance games/canvas based applications (figma).

But CRUD developers don’t know/care about those, I guess.

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#77

Post by Fluorescence »

wongarsu wrote: post #40
flohofwoe wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at least for the 90% of DOM APIs not using JavaScript-specific features The DOM is a Javascript API, so it uses 100% Javascript-specific features (every DOM manipulation requires accessing JS objects and their properties and lots of those properties and function args are Javascript strings) - none of those map trivially to WASM concepts. It's a bit like like asking why x86 assembly code doesn't allow "C++ stdlib ac…

I wouldn't call having objects and properties Javascript-specific. The article details how they were initially written with support by both Java and JavaScript in mind. Now WASM isn't object oriented like Java or JavaScript, but the concept of objects maps very cleanly to the concept of structs, member functions to simple functions that get the struct as first parameter (optionally with an indirection through a virtu…

IANABE (not a browser engineer)

On the one hand, JS DOM objects are idl generated wrappers for C++. In theory we can generate more WASM friendly wrappers.

On the other, the C++ code implementing the API will be tightly coupled to the entire JS type system and runtime. Not just the concept of an object but every single design decision from primitives to generators to dynamic types to prototypical inheritance to error handling...

Also, I believe the C++ DOM implementation itself is pretty tightly integrated with javascript and it's memory management e.g. nodes have references into the managed heap to use JS objects directly like EventListeners and js functions.

Creating a new non-JS DOM API doesn't sound intractable to me... but browsers annihilate my assumptions so it's probably millions of hours of effort and close to a rewrite...

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#78

Post by tcfhgj »

tlb wrote: post #60
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me one thing that your theoretical WASM can "revolutionize". Aside from more efficient covert crypto mining on shady sites.

I use it for a web version of some robotics simulation & visualization software I wrote in C++. It normally runs on as an app on Mac or Linux, but compiling to WASM lets me show public interactive demos. Before WASM, the options were: - require everyone to install an app to see visualizations - just show canned videos of visualizations - write and maintain a parallel Javascript version Demo at https://throbol.com/she…

> Throbol requires WebGPU. Try with Chrome, Edge, Safari, or Opera.

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#79

Post by auggierose »

tlb wrote: post #60
3cats-in-a-coat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me one thing that your theoretical WASM can "revolutionize". Aside from more efficient covert crypto mining on shady sites.

I use it for a web version of some robotics simulation & visualization software I wrote in C++. It normally runs on as an app on Mac or Linux, but compiling to WASM lets me show public interactive demos. Before WASM, the options were: - require everyone to install an app to see visualizations - just show canned videos of visualizations - write and maintain a parallel Javascript version Demo at https://throbol.com/she…

Doesn't work, neither with Safari nor with Chrome, at least not on macOS Monterey. I guess the whole stack is too modern for my 18-core Intel iMac Pro.

Re: When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?

#80

Post by MisterTea »

I am confused by this. If WASM is a VM then why would it understand the DOM? To me it akin to asking "When will Arm get DOM support?" Seems like the answer is "When someone writes the code that runs on WASM that interacts with the DOM." Am I missing something? (not a web dev.)
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