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What's stopping WebAssembly from effectively replacing JavaScript?
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this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2023
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Programming
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Replacing costs expertise, time, and money. Nobody wants to invest that for (to them) insignificant or even pointless reasons.
If you're using tooling, a framework, a library - each of those makes a switch more risky, costly, or impossible.
JavaScript works with the DOM. Why would you want to implement a separate WASM component that you have to interface with? JavaScript is good enough. Interfacing only brings problems with it.
When you use JS you are doing it right - because there is no other way to interface with the DOM. Anything else is built on top. How would you interface with WASM? Manually? Library? Framework? What programming do you use to compile to WASM with? How do you analyze and debug WASM when it executes in a compiled WASM-binary format?
The use case for WASM is performance, efficiency on CPU-bound operations. If CPU-bound performance is not a concern for you, or JS is good enough, there's little reason to use WASM. Other reasons are even more niche.
The language best suited for wasm is easily rust. And you can still interface with the Dom using frameworks like yew sycamore or leptos.
Debugging is still a little tricky but you can debug wasm in chrome and DWARF allows you to have source maps that map to your rust code. This is s problem the community is working to improve. Until then you have the full power of console log which is how a large portion of developers already debug their applications.