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by zanethomas 1188 days ago
I'm quite happy with javascript as it is but I understand you might prefer other languages.

I haven't had occasion to use wasm but it seems that it provides the ability to run most (all?) languages in the browser.

Here, for example, is f# wasm.

https://fsbolero.io/
2 comments
user3939382 1188 days ago
Your point touches on the hardest part of solving the problem. Even if we could all agree that JS needs to be replaced, which of course we can't, and we had a perfect ideal replacement that we all agreed upon, that already works -- what about the ecosystem? All the tutorials, videos, articles helping newcomers, all the libraries, linters, IDE integrations, build tools, etc.

The only way I can see the problem (assuming someone agrees it is) of JS getting solved is if something comes along that's so amazing and blows it out of the water so hard that adoption explodes and browsers start natively migrating to it, along the lines of what we've seen with TypeScript, but instead of a bandaid a full replacement.

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zanethomas 1188 days ago
I would be very unhappy with a suggestion to replace javascript. I like that I can mix functional, object-oriented, and procedural type code where each seems to be the best fit.

If something else comes along, gains a lot of traction, and develops its own ecosystem then javascript could conceivably eventually just fade into the background. But that's going to take time.

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Bellend 1188 days ago
todo app has always been the least inspiring demo that has ever existed.

Are there any wasm demos (not necessarily source code) to try that would blow my mind? Genuinely interested. Maybe I have seen dozens and it's not obvious.

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eyelidlessness 1188 days ago
The todo app isn’t meant to be inspiring, it’s basically the “hello world”/fibonacci/word count for web UI stuff, tightly coupled to benchmarking, and even more tightly coupled to demonstrating DX to the already-familiar. It’s basically a way to present any given solution’s trampoline to get started doing something real. To the extent it fails at that, it’s probably because it’s already doing way too much, not too little.
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zanethomas 1188 days ago
I've only briefly looked at wasm and haven't used it at all so I can't recommend anything.
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