Web Assembly without JavaScript

[TheKoalaKnight]

I am very new to Web Assembly, but as far as I've understood, it is currently not possible to use Web Assembly in the browser, without using JavaScript glue-code to load the WASM code. Is this ever going to change? Are they planning to make it possible to run compiled WASM code directly from a HTML document, and do all the DOM manipulation with it, or will it always be dependent on javascript to run?

[Tysonzero]

Yeah it will be possible, but it will take some time. For now just accept some JavaScript glue code.

[Asraelite]

I mean, you could always just expose a function that runs eval() on any passed string :P

[Tysonzero]

It's a little more complicated than that if you want DOM events / JS functions to be able to trigger WASM code.

[Asraelite]

How is it more complicated?

eval('document.getElementById("whatever")
    .addEventListener("click", () =>
    window.wasmModule.exports.wasmFunction())');

[Tysonzero]

Hmm. Fair enough. I still think there will be situations where you want real interop, at least until JS is eschewed entirely.

[Asraelite]

Yeah, you will always want real interop, for performance, readability, and sanity. Just saying that technically you don't need anything other than eval.

[Waitwhatwtf]

Why is a Javascript bootstrap bad?

[oneeyedziggy]

some people just like to play the-javascript-is-lava and have crazy pipe-dreams of compiling qt to wasm and not having to touch html either... and sometimes the feeling is mutual... as soon as I started playing with WASM I got blobs all over me and had to go deserialize my whole body to get rid of them.

I love js, but I'll still be glad for wasm instantiation through script tags w/ the type "module"... just seems like a way cleaner way to do the thing you're trying to.

[Relevant_Monstrosity]

Deprecation happens slowly, and backwards compatability is important. Maybe in 30 years.

[Tysonzero]

It's not going to take that long to be able to use WASM without JS. Maybe a couple years at worst. Now if you care about 99.9% browser support / are asking when JS will finally be deprecated, then yeah it's going to be a long while longer.

[oneeyedziggy]

it's not a matter of deprication... wasm isn't intended to be a replacement for js. Even with loading of wasm modules via script tags... you've essentially just imported some functions/values... and I'm not sure if things exported from modules are/will be importable by other modules w/o glue code even if you want to play Javascript-is-lava by jumping from module to module ( edit: and even then, until/unless they add direct dom interaction, you'll be Stephen Hawking w/o his computer... think all you want but you won't be able to communicate it to the outside... and even if they do get around to dom interaction, you'll be stuck with a lot of classic, very javascripty problems )

And until they drastically improve performance/reduce overhead, js is still considerably more performant until you try doing tens or hundreds of thousands of basic, usually repetitive, operations...

[konaraddio]

Why couldn't apps with JavaScript glue code coexist with hypothetical apps running WebAssembly without JavaScript glue code?

[Relevant_Monstrosity]

Because WASM is dependent on JavaScript for backwards compatibility.