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The big utility of WASM for me, like OP hints at, is bringing things that would be infeasible to port to the web to it, like, say https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/ and other conversion tools (eg ffmpeg-wasm). Much preferable to downloading something or uploading a file to some random person’s server
Do you happen to know where can I check out the cutoff version for each browser? https://caniuse.com/?search=wasm doesn't have it (or other things like WasmGC for that matter)
I don't think that's a very good goal. Jettisoning the DOM means jettisoning accessibility and being able to leverage everything that the browser gives you out-of-the-box. You have to render to a canvas and build everything from scratch. I think Wasm is great for supplementing a JS app, not replacing it (e.g. using a Wasm module to do some calculations in a Worker). I like to use the right tool for the job, and trying to use something other than JS to build a web app just seems a little janky to me.
At one point, there was a Host Bindings proposal that would enable you to do DOM manipulation (it looks like it was archived and moved to the Component Model spec [1]). That would probably be the ideal way to avoid as much JS as possible. However, browser vendors have been heavily optimizing their JS runtimes, and in some cases, Wasm may actually be slower than JS.
I've been following Wasm's progress for several years, which has been slow, but steady. Ironically, I think the web is actually the worst place to use it. There's so much cool non-web stuff being done with it and I'm more interested to see where that goes.
[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/component-model?tab=readme-ov...
A lazy chunked delivery strategy like used in the k8s stargz-snapshotter[0] project could be effective here, where it only pulls chunks as needed, but it would probably require wasm platform changes.
[0] https://github.com/containerd/stargz-snapshotter
A microcosm of the wasm issue was captured in this thread about implementing a web based git in JavaScript from scratch vs. compiling libgit
https://github.com/isomorphic-git/isomorphic-git/issues/268