[andyidsinga]

just curious - why would web assembly make it easier for those tools to reappear?

I used to use hose 90s GUI tools - VB's, VC's, Symantec's and Borland's java gui tools. Although they did work well for fixed UIs (absolute positioning) -- they were rather hard to get non-fixed uis working. IMHO Bootstrap's grid system was a real leap in this regard and (to me) still a pleasure to work with.

[sien]

Perhaps because I live in hope...

The main reason WASM and whatnot might make it easier is that instead of depending on thousands of Javascript libraries the way that so many modern web apps do perhaps a more controlled environment might include a better set of standard libraries and controls.

Also Javascript has evolved at a lightning pace which is remarkable but also makes any complex tooling for it tricky. 10 years ago jquery was the main thing, today React,Vue,Angular and so many other things are front end tools of choice.

But all that may be totally wishful thinking.

[madeofpalk]

I'm confused as to how having a common target to have _any_ language, including C, running on the web makes tooling easier rather than harder.

[sien]

The idea would be that WASM will facilitate a particular language with a good standard library would be used to create an easy to use GUI drawing and then coding setup.

But yes, it wouldn't support every language that could compile to WASM and you're right that would be even harder than creating a good tool for Javascript.

[ZenPsycho]

Such "easy to use GUI drawing libraries" would still need to be written in javascript. If you want actual things to appear in the browser you still need to interact with the DOM, which is actually harder with WASM, not easier.

And while it's technically possible to say, just compile QT to wasm and give it a CANVAS tag as a dumb drawing surface, you've just broken accessibility, and that's a deal breaker.

[int_19h]

Then we need APIs that would allow GUI frameworks that render onto <canvas> to support accessibility. Such APIs have existed on desktop platforms for decades now, and popular frameworks like Qt use them, even when they draw all the widgets themselves.

By the way, Qt-on-wasm-on-canvas is already a thing: http://blog.qt.io/blog/2018/05/22/qt-for-webassembly/

[pjmlp]

Native toolkits also support accessibility.

And while accessibility is a big issue, I must sadly acknowledge that I am yet to have a project require compliance and validate its implementation, as such it never gets done.

[andyidsinga]

I hear you on the tooling complexity side...