Programming

My wet dream is Segmentation fault in Firefox

I'll repost my comment yesterday about this very thing (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45279384#45283636)

It's also too early to worry about DOM apis over wasm instead of js.

The whole problem with the DOM is that it has too many methods which can't be phased out without losing backwards compatibility.

A new DOM wasm api would be better off starting with a reduced API of only the good data and operations.

The problem is that the DOM is still improving (even today), it's not stabilized so we don't have that reduced set to draw from, and if you were to mark a line in the sand and say this is our reduced set, it would already not be what developers want within a year or two.

New DOM stuff is coming out all the time, even right now we two features coming out that can completely change the way that developers could want to build applications:

• being able to move dom nodes without having to destroy and recreate them. This makes it possible so you can keep the state inside that dom node unaffected, such as a video playing without having to unload and reload a video. Now imagine if that state can be kept over the threshold of a multi-page view transition.

• the improved attr() api which can move a lot of an app's complexity from the imperative side to the declarative side. Imagine a single css file that allows html content creators to dictate their own grid layouts, without needing to calculate every possible grid layout at build time.

And just in the near future things are moving to allow html modules which could be used with new web component apis to prevent the need for frameworks in large applications.

Also language features can inform API design. Promises were added to JS after a bunch of DOM APIs were already written, and now promises can be abortable. Wouldn't we want the new reduced API set to also be built upon abortable promises? Yes we would. But if we wait a bit longer, we could also take advantage of newer language features being worked on in JS like structs and deeply immutable data structures.

TL;DR: It's still too early to work on a DOM api for wasm. It's better to wait for the DOM to stabalize first.