It is a reasonable big deal in the niche of computation intensive applications.

It would be an huge deal or revolution if it could perform faster on plain DOM manipulation. By now, plain Javascript is faster than WASM [0].

That's because all WASM's DOM manipulation must go through the Javascript engine and many browsers do JIT compilation on Javascript.

Edit: be aware that the article has a more interesting discussion on WASM on the server side, as a replacement of technologies such as Docker/containers, Java Virtual Machine and .Net.

[0] https://krausest.github.io/js-framework-benchmark/2023/table...

satvikpendem

Unless you don't use the DOM at all for UI for web apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696

It would enable any language to simply render their own UI and handle things like accessibility with their own accessibility based DOM that just handles the accessibility parts rather than the entire logic of the app. I believe this is what Flutter does.

rapnie

It is what Makepad is working on in an interesting way using Wasm and Rust. They have created a Figma-like DSL and a good code separation with the logic behind it. You can edit UI's of in-production apps, and they are bundling an editor for that. Accessibility is an issue, and the project are looking to offer proper support there. In their video linked on the README they run the conference slides on Makepad with live apps embedded and running at 120 fps.

https://github.com/makepad/makepad

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36567681