> But WebAssembly becomes even more interesting when you take another perspective. What if Compose for Web, the multiplatform incarnation of Jetpack Compose use

> But WebAssembly becomes even more interesting when you take another perspective. What if Compose for Web, the multiplatform incarnation of Jetpack Compose used on Android, would leverage Kotlin/Wasm instead of Kotlin/JS to perform pixel-perfect Canvas based rendering? It would not really be very web like. It'd be more like Flash or a Java Applet. User extensions would all be broken. This is a new thing coming people. Now that we have wasm, the native-app folks are super jazzed about not only switching programming langauges, but getting rid of HTML and the DOM. The plan goes: we're replacing structure markup & hypertext of webapps with just-a-bunch-of-pixels, big canvases, that are purely computational constructs. Declarative information is getting blown up by imperative processes; this is how native apps are having their revenge against webapps. I have yet to see how any of this actually empowers or helps users: it seems like a huge downgrade, done purely to give developers alternative options. Maybe the experiences really are vastly better, maybe what we make is categorically different once we have this tech! But I really have a hard time (given what creativity we've had & seeing how quickly bootcamp folks come in & get hacking on the DOM) believing the DOM is really so horrible that it justified de-internet-izing the web & that turning it into a motion picture machine is warranted (as anything more than early exploration). The web starts with the HTML/DOM, and has been our computing world's greatest, most universal tower of Babel[1] that has held. I'm curious (and admittedly pretty terrified) to see who is happier/winners when we bring down the higher-level system, & treat it like a low level interface, like a big Canvas, like what was happening with Flash & Applets. Two other recent examples beyond Kotlin/Compose: Flutter/CanvasKit (which I commented on & got a reply from the lead about on these topics[2]), and Hixie's "Towards a Modern Web Stack"[3]. [1] https://unwindprotect.com/tower-of-babel https://unwindprotect.com/tower-of-babel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34695638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34695638 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980 [3] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/preview?pli=1&resourcekey=0-bPajpoo9IBZpG__-uCBE6w https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696