[vinkelhake]

You can write a WASM program today that touches the DOM, it just needs to go through the regular JS APIs. While there were some discussions early on about making custom APIs for WASM to access, that has long since been dropped - there are just too many downsides.

[cedws]

But then you need two things instead of one. It should be made possible to build WASM-only SPAs. The north star of browser developers should be to deprecate JS runtimes the same way they did Flash.

[austin-cheney]

That is never going to happen until you create your own browser with a fork of the WASM spec. People have been asking for this for about a decade. The WASM team knows this but WASM wants to focus on its mission of being a universal compile target without distraction of the completely unrelated mission of being a JavaScript replacement.

[bonestamp2]

I agree with the first part, but getting rid of JS entirely means that if you want to augment some HTML with one line of javascript you have to build a WASM binary to do it?

I see good use cases for building entirely in html/JS and also building entirely in WASM.

[brokencode]

You can use a framework that abstracts all the WASM to JS communication for DOM access. There are many such framework already.

The only issue is that there’s a performance cost. Not sure how significant it is for typical applications, but it definitely exists.

It’d be nice to have direct DOM access, but if the performance is not a significant problem, then I can see the rationale for not putting in the major amount of work work it’d take to do this.

[lyu07282]

I was under the impression that this very much still on the table, with active work like the component model laying the foundation for the ABI to come.

[benrutter]

I have slightly different question than OP - what's left until it feels like javascript is gone for people who don't want to touch it?

Say I really want to write front end code in Rust* does there just need to be a library that handles the js DOM calls for me? After that, I don't ever have to think about javascript again?

[tcfhgj]

> Say I really want to write front end code in Rust* does there just need to be a library that handles the js DOM calls for me? After that, I don't ever have to think about javascript again?

yes, e.g. with Leptos you don't have to touch JS at all

[colordrops]

Isn't going through the JS APIs slow?

[nasso_dev]

used to be, in the early days, but nowadays runtimes optimized the function call overhead between WASM and JS to near zero

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/10/calls-between-javascript-a...

[zekrioca]

Could you list some of these downsides and what are the reason of their existence?

[cogman10]

For starters, the DOM API is huge and expansive. Simply giving WASM the DOM means you are greatly expanding what the sandbox can do. That means lower friction when writing WASM with much much higher security risks.

But further, WASM is more than just a browser thing at this point. You might be running in an environment that has no DOM to speak of (think nodejs). Having this bolted on extension simply for ease of use means you now need to decide how and when you communicate its availability.

And the benefits just aren't there. You can create a DOM exposing library for WASM if you really want to (I believe a few already exist) but you end up with a "what's the point". If you are trying to make some sort of UX framework based on wasm then you probably don't want to actually expose the DOM, you want to expose the framework functions.