Missing the Point of WebAssembly

Re:Missing the Point of WebAssembly by steveklabnik on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @04:52PM (#38932665)

When people say "can't yet interface directly with the DOM," the "directly" is the key bit. Projects in webassembly have been able to interact with the DOM forever, but they need to do it via JavaScript shims. I am not intimately familiar with Spritely, but from reading the post briefly, it appears this is exactly what they're doing:

  Scheme.load_main("hello.wasm", {}, {
    document: {
      body() { return document.body; },
      createTextNode: Document.prototype.createTextNode.bind(document)

This requires boilerplate and adds overhead that would not exist if it were able to be done "directly."

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Missing the Point of WebAssembly by davexunit on Tuesday January 09, 2024 @05:10PM (#38932941)

I suspect as time goes on we'll see more and more of this become direct through optimization. My understanding is that this already happens for certain well-known methods, like if you import Math.sin or something V8 is going to optimize it to a direct call when it compiles the Wasm module that imports it. And maybe a non-JS interface will emerge, but there needs to be some kind of layer that preserves capability security. You wouldn't want any and every Wasm module to have access to the entire browser API. You will still want the ability to omit capabilities, attenuate them, etc. and for that a full programming language seems necessary and well... JS is already there.

[ Parent | on HN ]