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by zhiel 1731 days ago
This is not a fever dream in my opinion, just replace Rust with your favorite language if that language targets WASM. Eventually, JS will be just another choice in a field of languages that would target WASM... then it is just a matter of preference.
1 comments
Oddskar 1731 days ago
People have been saying this for years. I don’t think it’s going to happen.
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zhiel 1731 days ago
Why not? WASM is gaining features after it's MVP, such as GC support, direct targeting with DOM APIs (with reference types and interface types), it's not a fast process, but it's coming. It doesn't take anything away from any programming language, but it provides a more efficient platform for those languages to run... what is there not to like?
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Zababa 1731 days ago
Lots of languages target JavaScript too, but only one got very popular, because ecosystem matters a lot. People are going to have to recreate the current JavaScript ecosystem for each languages, and then probably for each framework in that language.
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zhiel 1731 days ago
I have no idea who you are or how closely have you been following the ecosystem of languages, but like what? What you just said is what languages do
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Zababa 1731 days ago
No, not really. The only language that has mindshare in the frontend outside of JavaScript is TypeScript. Elm, CoffeeScript, Rescript and all of these are not known at all. In the JS ecosystem, Angular, React and Vue are king, but React is really fragmented with all the options (Next, etc). All of this because JavaScript is the most popular language in the world. Most other languages won't get that mindshare.

Elm doesn't have the JS ecosystem, Rust doesn't, Rescript doesn't. The thing is, when you're doing backend stuff, it's usually relatively easy to pull a library with whatever framework you're using. On the frontend, for your components, you need basically a library by framework by language.

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mr_toad 1731 days ago
> Why not?

Not enough people care enough to make it happen. I think most people underestimate the breadth of the work that would have to be done. The people in the best position do do it (the browser vendors) aren’t willing to do that.

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