[zellyn]

It's not just because it's shiny. Rust happens to (a) be a great fit for the parts of WebAssembly that have been implemented so far (partly because it doesn't need GC), and (b) have done a really good job of building WebAssembly tooling with nicer ergonomics than other languages.

[seanmcdirmid]

WASM is the new and shiny also. I'm not even sure what to do with it ATM given that the DOM story still hasn't been figured out.

[mnemonik]

There is a DOM story: host bindings. It just isn't implemented yet.

However, that doesn't mean that you can't use it now. wasm-bindgen is essentially a polyfill for host bindings plus some other little things.

Some resources to check out if you want to learn more:

* Host bindings: https://github.com/WebAssembly/host-bindings/blob/master/pro...

* More info about web-sys (web-sys is like the raw libc for the web): https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/web-sys/index.html

* API documentation for web-sys: https://docs.rs/web-sys/0.3.2/web_sys/

* DOM hello world example: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/examples/dom.html

* A mini MS Paint style example: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/examples/paint.html

* An FM synth in WebAudio: https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/examples/web-audio.h...

[swsieber]

Even though the DOM story hasn't been figured out, firefox has recently done work to make WASM <-> JS calls performant. So now things like Yew will probably be usable from a performance standpoint[0]. But apart from the DOM, it's good for CPU intensive things[1].

[0] Yew: https://github.com/DenisKolodin/yew [1] Refactoring a CPU intensive JS thing: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/oxidizing-source-maps-with...

[zellyn]

As a child raised on 80s 8-bit computers, and a fan of emulation, I love what WASM does for in-browser emulators. You can run an enormous amount of Apple II, Commodore 64, etc. software on archive.org, all compiled using emscripten.