3 ms·
Are we? There are and have been plenty of languages that target JavaScript for many years now. What does webasm actually enable that wasn't possible before?
by dom96 6y ago
Are we? There are and have been plenty of languages that target JavaScript for many years now. What does webasm actually enable that wasn't possible before?
- gameswithgo 6y agoAs per usual in the world of languages, nothing new is possible, but things can be easier and perform better.
- camgunz 6y agoThis is what WebAssembly has to say about it: https://webassembly.org/docs/faq/ https://webassembly.org/docs/faq/
- flohofwoe 6y agoPerformance (asm.js was pretty close but required special support from the JS engine too). But maybe more importantly: WASM frees Javascript from the future burden of being both a human-friendly programming language, and a machine-friendly compilation target.
- pjmlp 6y agoPlugins already made that performance possible.
- fulafel 6y agoPerformance for a few low-level languages yes (Rust, C/C++), but with the GC support stalled and even less developed language interop story, there isn't anything in the horizon that promises to make it a good platform for today's HLL's. Meanwhile there are many nice HLL's targeting JSVM with good performance. I think the human friendliness transition happened already when most JS programmers started compiling their JS-version-du-jour to legacy-JS.