Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bonobo3000 3772 days ago
>What's old is new again I suppose. The browser, in general, feels like a giant step forward. I wish, though, that some ecosystem had evolved where Javascript wasn't the sole supported client side language.

Webassembly is coming!
1 comments
tyingq 3772 days ago
That's somewhat encouraging, but if I understand it correctly, it would only be practical for static typed languages. Something like Lua, Python, etc, would be more desirable to me.
link
vmorgulis 3772 days ago
It's a byte code (in an ast form) so any language could run.

I think the step after can be around package management (like in linux distros) and full virtualisation in the browser.

We can even imagine the browser becoming useless so we could move to something new for AI, drones and robots where webdesign is not a priority (simpler UI like apps for mobiles).

link
tyingq 3772 days ago
Not anytime soon, as far as I can tell:

Brendan Eich: "wasm is really starting out as a target for static languages like C++, it’s gonna be a while before we get other future extensions to wasm like garbage collection and just-in-time compile to wasm, features we need for dynamic languages to perform well, that’s gonna take a while to do, too"

link