When will we be able to use any programming language in the web?

  • popcar2@programming.dev
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    9 days ago

    Right now. WASM has been supported by every browser for a while now, and most webapps are made with WASM. That said, it’s not a replacement for Javascript, most people only use it on things that need to be high performance like heavier apps and web games. Nobody really makes websites that rely on WebAssembly instead of JS to my knowledge.

    • demesisx@infosec.pub
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      9 days ago

      From my understanding, it’s because WASM is pure (deterministic) and needs stateful entry points in order to work. For this reason, a JavaScript bit to interact with it is a requirement at the moment.

      • popcar2@programming.dev
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        9 days ago

        Also WASM can’t directly manipulate the DOM so it can’t really be used for handling HTML/CSS, all front-end stuff still has to be done with JS.

        • vinnymac@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          While it’s true you can’t do it in WASM directly, there are frameworks that interoperate between WASM and JS, such as Yew

          One only needs to create an interface between them, since WASM is capable of calling JS functions. DOM manipulation then becomes as simple as calling a function in your language of choice, such as with web-sys

      • spacecadet@lemm.ee
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        9 days ago

        JS is slow, but I program Rust and Scala. Every internal app at my company is react based and I spend most my time waiting for that bloated framework to load a simple table. It can take seconds to load a 20 route paginated table from source.

      • Ace! _SL/S@ani.social
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        9 days ago

        JS is not slow.

        Since JS is single threaded it can be pretty slow compared to anything being able to use multiple threads

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 days ago

        JavaScript is slow if you need to do things that JavaScript can’t do, such as

        • lots of stack-allocated objects/arrays (in JavaScript you have to heap-allocate them)
        • hash maps with non-primitive types as keys (in JavaScript you have to serialize them to a string)
        • count trailing zero bits (in JavaScript you have to use a lookup table)