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peutetre 7 days ago

JavaScript will be killed off by WebAssembly.

Zombie JavaScript will be reduced to being glue code and then not even that.

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NohatCoder 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

The Webassembly dev experience is awful, and it needs to be glued together with JavaScript anyway. 99% of web code doesn't care about the performance difference, and anything GUI is wasting more time jumping back and forth to JavaScript to save any time at all.

	▲	peutetre 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> The Webassembly dev experience is awful It really isn't. Wasm is just a compilation target now.

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spacebanana7 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Network effects are very strong for languages.

Better query languages than SQL could exist, but there's so much existing code and expertise out there that it's not worth the effort. Better backend languages than Java can & do exist but don't have the same enterprise popularity.

Developers, projects and companies have an immense incentives to target the most popular programming language.

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peutetre 6 days ago | parent [-]

JavaScript's one advantage was that it was the privileged language in the browser. It has lost that now.

JavaScript has entered its Walking Dead phase. It will gradually be displaced by all languages compiling to WebAssembly.

	▲	spacebanana7 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		JavaScript’s main advantage is being commonly familiar to most software engineers. The English language similarly lost its position as the preeminent imperial language a long time ago, so too with Latin & Rome. It takes a long time for a popular language to die because everyone wants to speak what everybody else speaks.
	▲	saulpw 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		WASM has a lot of shortcomings. You can't even update the DOM without doing a worker dance.

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em-bee 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

only after they make DOM access easier. see previous discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41955585

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41955488

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yen223 7 days ago | parent | prev [-]

JavaScript will be killed off by webassembly for about 5 years now

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peutetre 7 days ago | parent [-]

The difference lately is the number of tools that are now in place for WebAssembly development and the new extensions to WebAssembly (WasmGC, Memory64, etc.).

Despite 28 years of effort at optimization, JavaScript is outperformed by WebAssembly. There's not much coming back from that:

https://jordaneldredge.com/blog/speeding-up-winamps-music-vi...

https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-...

https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc

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liontwist 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

?? JavaScript was outperformed by every language since it was introduced.

It doesn’t matter. What matters is what people put in their web pages.

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peutetre 6 days ago | parent [-]

But now JavaScript is no longer the privileged language in the browser.

With WebAssembly every language runs in the browser and runs better.

	▲	liontwist 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		And what will prove that is adoption. As others have said, that has been “just around the corner” for years.

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yoelhacks 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Javascript is outperformed by WebAssembly in the sense that it runs faster.

A lot of things that bring a lot of value to a lot of people are still much, much faster to build via the JS / TS ecosystem.

It absolutely makes sense that calculation-heavy workloads will be ported to WASM, but there's a lot more to building an app.

	▲	peutetre 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> but there's a lot more to building an app. Like what? Visual UI designers? WebAssembly's got you covered: https://platform.uno/blog/uno-platform-studio-featuring-hot-... Running Visual Basic in a C# application compiled to WebAssembly? Sure, why not: https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/