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by k__ 3304 days ago
I guess the first ones jumping on the WebAssembly wagon will be Web developers, so we will probably get WASM modules written in languages they see appropriate, when JS doesn't cut it anymore.

I guess it will be Rust or Go.

Rust because of Cargo (for npm users a big +) and Mozilla (good marketing of Rust).

Go because of Google (also a Web company with good marketing) and because I read some Node.js developers already switched to Go before WASM.
4 comments
meheleventyone 3304 days ago
A lot of current experiments seem to be the other way around. People with C/C++ projects porting them to WebAssembly. This is partly due to the initial limitations in the current version though.

I'm not a web developer but this has definitely peaked my interest to the point I've been dabbling with WebAssembly. It's really easy to get going so I could see a lot of people with other than WebDev backgrounds getting into application development in the browser.

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jsfitzsimmons 3304 days ago
Doesn't WASM need GC support before Go can be used? It'll need to be fully managed languages until then, I think.

With that said I'm just parroting some other comments I've seen on this topic in other contexts, so I'm asking the question genuinely.

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dragonwriter 3304 days ago
> Doesn't WASM need GC support before Go can be used?

Why can't the Go implementation can have its own GC, the same as the Go implementation for, say, x86 does?

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Houshalter 3303 days ago
It's possible but will run much slower with some of the restrictions in webasm.
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I_am_tiberius 3304 days ago
Incredibly interested in the answer to that question as well. Go will not have a future in regards to web development if they don't find a solution for the GC issue in wasm. I assume (and hope) that's a bigger topic compiler-team internally as well currently.
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hooluupog 3304 days ago
FYI,https://go.googlesource.com/gollvm/
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I_am_tiberius 3303 days ago
Interesting, thanks
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steveklabnik 3303 days ago
Rust already supports compiling to wasm as well.
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lacampbell 3304 days ago
I think if the web assembly experiment succeeds it will spawn new languages that become wildly popular. The web is huge, and client side programming is just a different animal.
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