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by jacobr1 1326 days ago
> there is nothing on the horizon which will plausibly replace it

I'm not going to be making any bets - but the one project that has possibility is WASM. A mature, polyglot ecosystem on top of WASM runtimes with web-apis seem like it could displace JS in browser as #1.
2 comments
still_grokking 1326 days ago
Almost no languages run as WASM.

This is not likely to change anytime soon (if ever), as nobody is working on this, and there is even quite strong opposition to get features in that are fundamentally needed to run anything else than the very few languages that already compile to WASM. ("Nobody" is interested in invalidating their investment in JS ;-)).

Also WASM is actually slow, or better said, "it does not deliver its full potential".

It will need advanced JIT compilers to keep up with the other two mayor VM langues. But in this regard WASM is behind around 20 years of constant development and improvement.

My strongest hopes in this regard are currently with Microsoft (even I don't trust this company at all!), who are indeed interested to run their CLR stuff in a WASM VM, and could probably deliver on the needed features. But then, when you would run a CLR-VM (or a JVM) on top of a WASM VM, you know, you're building just the next Matryoshka… There are no real benefits to that besides "look mom, it runs in the browser".

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chrisco255 1326 days ago
Probably not. Unless you're rendering to another target besides the DOM (ie canvas) I doubt you see JS displacement as #1 in the browser. JS is not the performance bottleneck, the DOM itself is. And in the meantime, you've got 25 years of example code, component libraries, talent development, dev productivity tooling, browser integration, etc built up around it.

And unlike other operating systems, the browser does not give you any kind of standard library of reasonably good components to build on. So the sheer size and volume of components and the ecosystem built up around npm well be an uphill battle for any WASM target language to compete with.

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johnnyanmac 1324 days ago
>Unless you're rendering to another target besides the DOM (ie canvas) I doubt you see JS displacement as #1 in the browser.

if we're talking on the level of 20,30,50 years, we may in fact be able to move away from a DOM-based web. and WASM is simply a binary spec, so it can adjut with whatever comes on the horizon. We've had similar sized giants rise and fall in that span.

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