This subject is interesting because your typical college educated developer HATES the DOM with extreme passion, because it’s entirely outside their area of comfort. The typical college educated developer is typically educated to program in something like Java, C#, or C++ and is how the world is supposed to work. The DOM doesn’t work like that. It’s a graph of nodes in the form of a tree model, and many developers find that to be scary shit. That’s why we have things like jQuery, Angular, and React.
These college educated developers also hate JavaScript for the same reasons. It doesn’t behave like Java. So for many developers the only value of WASM is as JavaScript replacement. WASM was never intended or positioned to be a JavaScript replacement so it doesn’t get used very often.
Think about how bloated and slow the web could become if WASM were a JavaScript replacement. Users would have to wait on all the run time and dependencies to download into the WASM sandbox and then open like a desktop application, but then all that would get wrapped in something like Angular or React because the DOM is still scary.
> Java, C#, or C++ and is how the world is supposed to work. The DOM doesn’t work like that. It’s a graph of nodes in the form of a tree model
This makes no sense. A graph of nodes is a very common data structure in all these languages. Not only that, but DOM was originally designed with those languages in mind (hence why it's defined via IDL). Indeed, Java actually used to have the complete DOM API in its standard library: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.xml/...
I have 20 years of experience writing software with hundreds and hundreds of other developers for mega dot coms that indicates many, possibly most, developers do everything possible to hide from tree structures. I don’t know why that is because it’s neither scary nor challenging.
It’s also strange that my prior comment here is maximally downvoted when the similar comment it linked to was upvoted to triple digits. This further reaffirms my assumption that WASM primarily appeals to insecure developers.
I can understand how developers would be scared of tree structures. This doesn't make sense when you specifically call out people with degrees however, as we worked with trees to a fault in my Computer Science degree. But maybe I'm reading too much into this - there are different "college eduction" paths people may take that are not Computer Science.
This subject is interesting because your typical college educated developer HATES the DOM with extreme passion, because it’s entirely outside their area of comfort. The typical college educated developer is typically educated to program in something like Java, C#, or C++ and is how the world is supposed to work. The DOM doesn’t work like that. It’s a graph of nodes in the form of a tree model, and many developers find that to be scary shit. That’s why we have things like jQuery, Angular, and React.
These college educated developers also hate JavaScript for the same reasons. It doesn’t behave like Java. So for many developers the only value of WASM is as JavaScript replacement. WASM was never intended or positioned to be a JavaScript replacement so it doesn’t get used very often.
Think about how bloated and slow the web could become if WASM were a JavaScript replacement. Users would have to wait on all the run time and dependencies to download into the WASM sandbox and then open like a desktop application, but then all that would get wrapped in something like Angular or React because the DOM is still scary.