[erikpukinskis]

Transpiling sucks. It breaks debugging. The JavaScript community tolerates it but you can bet everyone who can avoid it will do so. We’re in the transpilation age, which does, as you indicate, provide an “in” for other languages.

But for me, JavaScript is not about having your dinner made just how you like it. It’s about targeting the lowest common denominator and keeping your code simple because of that.

I think that’s where JavaScript is headed in the limit. We’re at the low point for “just put a file in the browser, it’ll work!” But I guarantee you that style will come back in the next wave. You already see people going that way today. Casting off Babel and using much simpler packaging tools with code that’s natively readable in the most common browsers.

Would you package Rust for the JVM? Maybe. But it would not be fun.