WASM makes things worse because now "rewrite it in hip new frontend framework X" has more options. Tired of React? Try Blazor WASM (C#) or any of the exciting new Rust-based front ends or any of the up-and-comers in Swift, Go, Perl, Befunge, Intercal, and other favorite languages or flavors of the month. Dart's not just a thing for people installing Chrome Extensions, now you can use it in WASM almost like Father Google intended when Dart was originally envisioned.
Most of these languages can at least use Web Components for some sort of interoperability. At least the ones doing FFI to JS for DOM manipulation. Of course the "new WASM hotness" for "performance" is "do everything in a canvas and avoid the DOM altogether".
Every WASM "app" is an opaque VM to itself. Many WASM languages bundle a lot of things the browser already provides (beyond the ones also building their own DOM engines for canvas-based UIs) including things like GC. Maybe future proposals like WASM GC will start to break down the barriers between WASM languages/runtimes, and open up more instances of memory sharing and data structure reuse. Maybe. The flipside is every GC is special and not every language wants a weak version of JS' GC underpinning their memory management. Hopes for real convergence of WASM language runtimes seem very optimistic to me. (Especially in a world where even the JS DOM is being skipped for canvas apps because some languages want that control.)
WASM may be the final state of the web in terms of being the diaspora of too many languages running on the web and the true death of the View Source web.
> A foreign function interface (FFI) is a mechanism by which a program written in one programming language can call routines or make use of services written or compiled in another one
I'd be fine with pure HTML Websites, just give me a way to make auth extremely secure.
Been ditching js based things outside of work and I'm really enjoying BEAM. It is puzzling to me why companies prefer having 200 microservices orchestrated with Kubernetes if they could have it so much easier by ditching js...
