← Back to context

Comment by piker

15 hours ago

> "Trivial" in the sense you can just compile everything to WASM? I'd be curious to know what such an IDE would feel like in the browser. I think the only WASM-based GUI apps I've tried in the browser were Flutter apps and those were… weird.

Yes, that's about it. We rely on threads a lot in the desktop version which doesn't map as easily to WASM so there is still some work to do. But if you remember back to the original Show HN post, it was running in the browser there. So we have experience with it.

There is a bit of uncanny valley that comes with using WASM with <canvas> in the browser like we do rather than the DOM. There aren't reflow events in the same way, and frankly it's just a lot snappier than you expect. But it comes with a lot of trade-offs and you're forced to reinvent the wheel if you totally abandon web primitives.