[gspr]

I wanted to love it. As someone who hasn't done any web stuff since I was a child, I thought it'd amazing for it to be "just another platform".

I'm a bit disappointed though:

* There's still no way to do DOM manipulation. So then it's tempting to just grab a canvas and draw everything yourself, which of course wreaks on things like accessibility. I'm no fan of the web, but at least it comes with a somewhat agreed-upon way to display graphical stuff – it's a bit of a shame if we're all gonna just treat it like a surface for pixels.

* WASI still leaves something to be desired. Why can't I have raw sockets and file access and stuff, in a POSIX-like way? I understand that sandboxing is important, so this can all be on a per-request-basis, but still. This "just another platform" is still too far from just that.

* The amount of JS glue needed to actually load WASM stuff in the browser is annoying. The idea of needing a bunch of magic "bundlers" is sad.

[muvlon]

> WASI still leaves something to be desired. Why can't I have raw sockets and file access and stuff, in a POSIX-like way?

FWIW, that's exactly what they shipped first, with WASI preview 1 (wasip1). You can still use this today, and all runtimes with any level of WASI support will be able to run it.

[postalrat]

If enough people adopt identical or similar js glue then they can use that for a new standard. If people dont care about a standard interface then why both creaing a new standard? Look what happened with jquery selectors and ajax. People loved it and it became the new standard built into browsers.

[samiv]

You can call JS in which you can manipulate the DOM.

Of course architecturally (also regarding your file access) it's better to use the wasm for logic as much as possible where the web (HTML/JS) provides the UI and IO, data flows into wasm for work and results flow back to the web.

This also has the benefit that you can keep your original C/C++ source code much more platform agnostic which helps reusability and testing.

[gspr]

> You can call JS in which you can manipulate the DOM.

Well sure. But for me, the promise of WASM was to make the browser "just another platform". Now it's "this special platform where you have to access some of the most important functionality through FFI interop with a very high-level, very opinionated language".

> Of course architecturally (also regarding your file access) it's better to use the wasm for logic as much as possible where the web (HTML/JS) provides the UI and IO, data flows into wasm for work and results flow back to the web.

OK, but like, I wanted the browser to be "just another platform". I don't want to use JS, and I consider HTML orthogonal to my logic. I realize that's not where we're at, but that's what I dreamt of. Hence my disappointment. Which is OK, I don't matter :)

> This also has the benefit that you can keep your original C/C++ source code much more platform agnostic which helps reusability and testing.

It feels the opposite to me.

[jayd16]

Hmm well I guess I don't quite get what counts as "just another platform." Surely every platform is going to have the native APIs that you need to abstract over. Why is WASM different?

Is it just a matter of WASM being too new to have full featured wrappers and APIs for your language of choice?

[trumpdong]

There's no way to draw on a canvas in WASM either. You just decided to write JS wrapper functions for that. But you didn't write wrapper functions for DOM manipulation.

[gspr]

You're right. But at least the JS wrapper for the canvas is just used for setting up the shared memory, if I remember correctly?

At any rate: this doubly makes my point.