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> But I honestly don't see writing non-javascript web applications being mainstream any more than it is now at any point in the near-ish future. The performanc
by fizzbatter 10y ago
> But I honestly don't see writing non-javascript web applications being mainstream any more than it is now at any point in the near-ish future.
The performance of touching the DOM and browser APIs will be the factor that decides that, imo. I think you may be underestimating how many people are partially or heavily disgruntled at javascript, and would happily replace it if given the chance.
If speed is not an issue, and it's purely by choice of the user, i think there will be a lot of interesting changes to the web in the coming years.
Hell, for many applications i'd even be willing to accept a speed loss to use "my preferred language". And, in the event that certain tasks are indeed too slow, perhaps i'll be able to pass data back and forth between my WASM and JS to let JS deal with the performance critical DOM.
Regardless, i'm quite excited, and hope to see something fruitful from it.
- bluejekyll 10y agoYes. With this we can finally be less restricted in our language choice. I think the community of people who want tyoe safe languages is large, and this will the a target for them. I just hope for Dom bindings through the WASM ABI.
- douche 10y agoJavascript is awful. If WebAssembly is anywhere near consistent across browsers, and there are better languages that compile to WebAssembly, I would go that way in a New York minute.
- modarts 10y ago> how many people are partially or heavily disgruntled at javascript It's not actually the nightmare many make it out to be with ES6. I actually enjoy writing it quite a bit (I have mainly a functional background)
- fizzbatter 10y agoYea, fwiw these days it is much better. But i think the biggest issue is simply the lack of choice. On my OS, i can choose whatever language i want. Whether i choose for preference, or the right tool for the job, i have choices, many of them. On the web it's.. well, just JS. Some languages that transpile to JS.. but ultimately they're all pretty much just JS.
- yoklov 10y agoIf your language of choice comes with a runtime that's not shipped in the browser, WASM doesn't seem like it will make speed into a non-issue, it will just frontload the slowness.
- fizzbatter 10y agoftr, when i mentioned speed i was mainly referring to WASM->DOM. So, if that ends up too slow for heavy DOM manipulation (eg, React style diffing/etc), then with any luck we can offload the DOM interactions to JS. Eg, WASM->JS->DOM