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by Gxorgxo 3570 days ago
If you transpile to ES5 you get code that still has to run in the JS engine. WebAssembly is low-level code that gets executed faster and allows you to build different kinds of abstractions on top of it. It's comparable to sending an executable to the browser, it could have been written in any language.
2 comments
FrancoDiaz 3569 days ago
Uhmm...yeah, I thought I pretty much said that. My point was from the application developer's perspective, what's the difference? Even now, C++ can be compiled to JS via EMScripten to asm.js.

I don't write "JavaScript" right now. I write Typescript. Most of the front-end ecosystems that I deal with (primarily Aurelia and React) aren't being written in ES5. It's usually ES6/7 and Typescript.

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gsnedders 3569 days ago
WebAssembly is still run in the JS engine, though. And especially if we start adding GC support to it, that's not going to change.
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