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What parts are not available? WebAssembly can call arbitrary JavaScript through imports. You could literally provide an `eval` function if you were motivated to.
direct access to the DOM for example without having to go through the javascript host, which is slow and makes DOM intensive applications impractical
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What parts are not available? WebAssembly can call arbitrary JavaScript through imports. You could literally provide an `eval` function if you were motivated to.
direct access to the DOM for example without having to go through the javascript host, which is slow and makes DOM intensive applications impractical
Why JS0 and not wasm? Why is wasm so damn limited?
Why is wasm so damn limited?
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That part caught my attention too. It reminds me of the discussion to remove complex numbers from Go. Funny enough, compiler writers can't even imagine why you would want BigInt or Complex, because those aren't useful for writing compilers.
one contributor to the pike programming language when asked why he took the effort to optimize syntactic sugar responded: so that pike users can write simple code and still have it run blazingly fast. in pike, bigint and int are integrated in such a way that the transition is automatic. there is no overflow but as long as the values fit in an int, that is used internally to keep the code fast.
However, that works for int and bigint, but Number (double precision) can represent numbers that BigInt can not, and BigInt can represent numbers which Number can not. There isn't a graceful way to automatically promote/degrade one to the other in all cases, and a silent conversion will do the wrong thing in many cases.
Better to focus on WebAssembly instead. Bring every language to the web. JavaScript for some scripting, any other language for bigger applications.
Yes and no, there is a significant bundle size problem with wasm which is hard to fix. I'd rather we just move to native cross platform applications and stop using a document browser to build interactive applications. What's more likely is that all of this will probably be eclipsed by LLM and virtual assistants - which could be controlled by native apps with a dynamically generated GUI or voice. I think APIs exposing…
Here you go. Do both native and wasm:
Flutter example:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41936300
Language Evolution: Problems, and What Can We Do About It? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41795190 - Oct 2024 (1 comment)
Proposal of JavaScript becoming a compiled language: JS0 and JSSugar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41764825 - Oct 2024 (2 comments)
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They’re already moving it that way, it’s not like it isn’t without complexities and such either. WASM isn’t the silver bullet everyone seems to cling to. I feel like the WASM fervor has more to do with the fact people don’t enjoy using Frontend tools or JavaScript etc. vs looking at the actual utility tradeoffs
>> WASM isn’t the silver bullet everyone seems to cling to. And it isn’t the silver bullet exactly for the reason that it's horribly complicated to access normal JS objects including strings.
Copy from JavaScript to WebAssembly:
Use TextEncoder to convert a JS String to Uint8Array
Copy the bytes from the Uint8Array to WemAssembly.Memory
Copy from WebAssembly to JavaScript:
Copy the bytes from WebAssembly.Memory into a Uint8Array
Use TextDecoder to convert from Uint8Array to JS String
> Regarding BigInt, the presentation states that “use cases never materialized.” Yet every language has either that or BigDecimal. Even if Google's frontend devs haven't found a use, there also exist JS devs outside of Google who certainly have found uses (though possibly more of them on the backend). Similarly, not every developer has a compilation step in their JS work. And there are places where you can't have one…
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direct access to the DOM for example without having to go through the javascript host, which is slow and makes DOM intensive applications impractical
Can you give an example of anything anywhere that manipulates the DOM without using JavaScript? Because it seems to me that pretty much every web application is currently using the javascript host, and the well written ones are pretty snappy.
did you mean there are snappy webapplications running in WASM? if you have any examples, i'd be curiuos to learn more.