I think all of your arguments go precisely into the other direction, at least at the moment. Browsers are huge code bases, and have at least at their core very

I think all of your arguments go precisely into the other direction, at least at the moment. Browsers are huge code bases, and have at least at their core very high quality code. So for starters, the security advantages are actually on the side of low level languages, since you do not import the problems of the VM. ( Granted most VMs are also really high quality code, but if you do your memory management yourself, you can fine tune it for your use case.) Additionally, the 20-50% speedup are perhaps not the factor of 10 of yonder years, but they are still a speedup. And last but not least, a browser is a runtime environment. You need to do the memory management for JS anyhow, so you can also use the memory management for the rest of your code. So it is possible that at some point other languages than C/C++ will be the languages of choice for large projects. But frankly I think that these will not be GC languages, but languages were you get the GC somehow from the paradigm. ( I am currently thinking of Haskell. Functional languages can do really interesting things with GC, since all their data is local. )