You can already make apps that write directly to a canvas today, and almost nobody does because they want what the DOM provides for them. Wasm changes nothing about the APIs available to web apps.
The “single array of memory” is not the problem; that’s what all these languages already expect. The problem is the lack of meaningful memory APIs, e.g. virtual memory capabilities. I am co-champion of a proposal to fix this but have not been able to prioritize it for a while, unfortunately: https://github.com/WebAssembly/memory-control/blob/main/prop...
A lot of the time I think you just won’t want to use multiple components. It’s nice to be able to compose them together, I guess, but in general it seems to me that a toolchain will typically just want to generate a single big component so that everything can interact without limits internally.
This is not strictly true; there are synchronous APIs for compiling Wasm (`new WebAssembly.Module()` and `new WebAssembly.Instance()`) and you can directly embed the bytecode in your source file using a typed array or base64-encoded string. Of course, this is not as pleasant as simply importing a module :)
As someone on the SpiderMonkey team who had to evaluate some of Anthropic's bugs, I can definitely say that Anthropic's test cases were definitely far easier to assess than those generated by traditional fuzzers. Instead of extremely random and mostly superfluous gibberish, we received test cases that actually resembled a coherent program.
> I don't think making it a DOM controller is where the action is
Why not? I feel like people have gotten so used to the limitations of WebAssembly today that they've internalized JS as the only answer. But I don't really like JS, and would love to build web apps in other languages, and I totally would if it wasn't a huge pain (and slower too!)
Basically, it's sugar for `package` and `world` in the case where you aren't actually defining a world for others to use, and just for your own use. In such a case, the package and world names are irrelevant anyway.
Most of the time it's genuinely much easier to use Rust or Go than to use Python or Node because the tools are just so much better. This is why I don't like judging "high level" or "low level" by some perceived position in the stack. All I care about is how well it lets me express my intent as a programmer.
It's very easy to say the New Reddit devs were just "doing it wrong" and oversubscribing their components to Redux state, for example. (I love me a good `state => state` selector.) But also, this irrelevant-update problem was pervasive across all of New Reddit, across the app I worked on professionally for five years, and across many other applications I've looked at with the React and Redux dev tools. Irrelevant updates happen all the time with this stack.
If everyone who uses it seriously ends up "doing it wrong", I say it's the framework's fault.
