[pcwalton]

> Web Assembly is not even there yet, asm.js up until recent was more a toy and a standalone runtime, I have not seen it being routinely used for a fallback, nothing like, say, python with C modules.

That's because (a) page performance is frequently gated on things other than JavaScript, so people don't go through a lot of trouble to write C++; (b) many modules that would be written in C in Python are provided by the browser itself; (c) JS itself is usually fast enough, since the gap between JS and C++ is much less than the gap between Python and C++.

> As for virtual methods, it is a problem of a bad C++, devirtualisation may help, but nobody cares in general.

Huh? Tons of people care about devirtualization! Much of the reason Firefox builds go to the trouble of PGO (and it is a huge amount of trouble) is to get devirtualization.

> As for virtual methods, it is a problem of a bad C++

So I could say the same thing about JavaScript: if it's slow, you're writing "bad JS". But you would rightly reject that as invalid: if the code people write in practice is slow, then the problem is with the language encouraging people to write slow code. The point is that the same thing applies to C++.

[sklogic]

See? The evolution of the language and its ecosystem was driven by the peculiar web needs. No surprise the language became what it is now. No surprise it sucks shit every time it spills out of its native domain.

As for C++ - there is a choice. With JS the choice is much more limited. You either rely on non-standard asm.js behaviour, lose DOM access with web assembly, or tolerate the stupidity and limitations of the language that far overgrown its tiny niche.

Btw., I am yet to hear how a language with a fixed syntax and no macros can be perceived as "highly expressive".