[osdiab]

If web programmers had the choice to install an arbitrary language's runtime in users' browsers, they would. But users have disparate browsers with disparate JS implementations, so if you want to code in a sane language with consistent behavior, you'll need to transpile and polyfill it.

You can't just distribute arbitrary binaries to users on the web, so web developers have to deal with a layer of complexity that other programs don't have to. That said, maybe WebAssembly will change this story.

[de_watcher]

> web developers have to deal with a layer of complexity that other programs don't have to

yep, other programs totally don't need to deal with different OS, graphics APIs, GPU driverstacks and hardware architectures.

[exogen]

Those are all runtime concerns. They don't affect the literal syntax that you write, as is the case with JavaScript. You can't feature-detect syntax. Instead your entire program will just fail to parse.

[de_watcher]

So like shaders?