The potential of Kotlin/WASM
&gt; <i>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&#x2F;Wasm instead of Kotlin&#x2F;JS to perform pixel-perfect Canvas based rendering?</i><p>It would not really be very web like. It&#x27;d be more like Flash or a Java Applet. User extensions would all be broken.<p>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&#x27;re replacing structure markup &amp; 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&#x27;ve had &amp; seeing how quickly bootcamp folks come in &amp; get hacking on the DOM) believing the DOM is really so horrible that it justified de-internet-izing the web &amp; that turning it into a motion picture machine is warranted (as anything more than early exploration).<p>The web starts with the HTML&#x2F;DOM, and has been our computing world&#x27;s greatest, most universal tower of Babel[1] that has held. I&#x27;m curious (and admittedly pretty terrified) to see who is happier&#x2F;winners when we bring down the higher-level system, &amp; treat it like a low level interface, like a big Canvas, like what was happening with Flash &amp; Applets. Two other recent examples beyond Kotlin&#x2F;Compose: Flutter&#x2F;CanvasKit (which I commented on &amp; got a reply from the lead about on these topics[2]), and Hixie&#x27;s &quot;Towards a Modern Web Stack&quot;[3].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unwindprotect.com&#x2F;tower-of-babel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;unwindprotect.com&#x2F;tower-of-babel</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34695638" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34695638</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34527980" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34527980</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;d&#x2F;1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0&#x2F;preview?pli=1&amp;resourcekey=0-bPajpoo9IBZpG__-uCBE6w" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.google.com&#x2F;document&#x2F;d&#x2F;1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC...</a> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34612696" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34612696</a>