[rictic]

I don't think it's fair to characterize Traceur or TypeScript as plays to put Javascript under their author's control. Both have been useful for developing ES6, which Firefox has also been a leading implementer of. From my perspective almost all of the browser makers doing lots of cool stuff to push forward javascript and the web.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

You're assuming StevePerkins was referring to Tracuer or TypeScript, I don't think they were. I assume they meant things like NaCl and Dart.

[rictic]

A bit of an assumption yes, here's my reasoning though. Traceur and Typescript (and perhaps Flow and AtScript) are similar efforts made by different players that require transpilation and are potential visions for a direction javascript could go in. This combined with the author's quote "All of the other players..." made me think that's the family of solutions they were referring to.

NaCl and Dart are both by a single player and there's nothing else like them that I know about but Mozilla's asm.js, which the author is praising here, so they didn't seem like likely candidates.

[cromwellian]

Dart compiled to JS just like Emscripten.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Technically it compiles to JS, yes, but the reason people have a problem with Dart is the idea of embedding a Dart VM in the browser.

(And some features of the core language only work with an embedded Dart VM)