4 ms·

LLVM kinda proved having a common target back-end doesn't kill language diversity, it actually achieves the opposite.

adrianmonk 7y ago
One could still ask the question, though. The way that coding language and deployment/executable language have been tied together (JS for both) has served as a force that pushed everyone toward that single language. Now that WebAssembly promises to remove that force, will it be a free-for-all, or will other forces push toward standardization on a few languages? And if so, what will those forces be?
- int_19h 7y ago
  Likely the ones that are on the bandwagon early. To be even more specific, in the early days now, the main allure of wasm is performance. So the focus will be on languages and toolchains capable of generating optimized native code. Out of those, look at which ones are easy for the developer to set up (both in general, and for wasm) on all popular developer OSes. So, I'd say that Rust will probably be the biggest beneficiary.
  - snak 7y ago
    C#/.NET will be in that bandwagon. They have been pushing WebAssembly usage with their Blazor framework.
  - adrianmonk 7y ago
    The performance angle is interesting. Right now JS has lots of mindshare and momentum for obvious reasons, so maybe the things that will take off at first are the ones that help web developers in specific areas where JS performance is not good enough, perhaps graphics for example.
duxup 7y ago
I wonder if web development were to shift dramatically... would it go to largely one or a few languages?
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  There are always few languages that dominate a niche. I imagine binary size would be a concern for web development, what is a negative for complex runtimes... But then, if I carefully set the compiler to trim dead code, my Haskell email server is smaller than any modern JS framework (still larger than a new version Jquery), so the runtime may not actually make much of a difference.

One could still ask the question, though. The way that coding language and deployment/executable language have been tied together (JS for both) has served as a force that pushed everyone toward that single language. Now that WebAssembly promises to remove that force, will it be a free-for-all, or will other forces push toward standardization on a few languages? And if so, what will those forces be?

int_19h 7y ago
Likely the ones that are on the bandwagon early. To be even more specific, in the early days now, the main allure of wasm is performance. So the focus will be on languages and toolchains capable of generating optimized native code. Out of those, look at which ones are easy for the developer to set up (both in general, and for wasm) on all popular developer OSes. So, I'd say that Rust will probably be the biggest beneficiary.
- snak 7y ago
  C#/.NET will be in that bandwagon. They have been pushing WebAssembly usage with their Blazor framework.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  The performance angle is interesting. Right now JS has lots of mindshare and momentum for obvious reasons, so maybe the things that will take off at first are the ones that help web developers in specific areas where JS performance is not good enough, perhaps graphics for example.

duxup 7y ago

I wonder if web development were to shift dramatically... would it go to largely one or a few languages?

marcosdumay 7y ago
There are always few languages that dominate a niche. I imagine binary size would be a concern for web development, what is a negative for complex runtimes... But then, if I carefully set the compiler to trim dead code, my Haskell email server is smaller than any modern JS framework (still larger than a new version Jquery), so the runtime may not actually make much of a difference.