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by afavour 403 days ago
That’s actually what I feared the most and I’m glad we haven’t seen it happen.

Python and Go are not small languages, making users download entire runtimes to do something that can be done fine without them would be a huge shame. The performance problem with web UI is the DOM, not JavaScript.
3 comments
camdenreslink 403 days ago
I kind of thought popular runtimes would just be bundled with the browser if we could get an "official" enough source (e.g. Python Software Foundation or Google). Then users wouldn't need to download a million different versions and sources of Python for each website.
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lylejantzi3rd 403 days ago
You can mitigate some of that with web workers, but it's a shame that multiple websites can't share a python runtime the same way they can on a shared linux box. You have to download a separate one for every website that uses it. But, if you follow that train of thought to the end, you wind up with the browser itself bundling those runtimes, just like it did with Flash back in the day.

I'm not sure any of this would be an improvement over what we have now.

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chii 403 days ago
the only good reason to build these runtimes is to enable existing applications to be recompiled into wasm for use inside the browser - it doesnt make sense to greenfield an application that uses non-web UI libraries, only to then bundle the entire UI runtime with it.
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hinkley 403 days ago
At least with Go static analysis should allow you to tree shake the bits you aren’t using.

The problem with the CDN solution was always that it assumed that everyone would be on a couple versions and that never happens. With success comes more contributors and with more contributors come more point releases and more users who are not on the latest version.

So soon you could have five versions for five sites you visit.

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