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A comment on Experimental support for WebAssembly in V8. Parent comment

Re:Experimental support for WebAssembly in V8 by skybrian on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @02:32PM (#11291896)
If you want to target WebAssembly, I suggest starting with Rust or some other language that doesn't require a garbage collector.

WebAssembly doesn't have a garbage collector (yet) which is essential for JavaScript and many other high-level languages. Shipping a garbage collector compiled to WebAssembly is going to make downloads much larger, and it's likely going to perform worse than the native garbage collector.

A compiler for a garbage-collected language is probably better off targeting JavaScript, not WebAssembly. There are already lots of languages that do this: GWT, Dart, Kotlin, ClosureScript, Elm, etc. There was already plenty of work to do for a compiler expert even before WebAssembly came along.

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Re:Experimental support for WebAssembly in V8 by xigency on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @05:38PM (#11293212)
The purpose is to limit the number of steps in development.

If only 50% of users are running the WebAssembly version of a product, and 50% are running the JavaScript version of the product, then both need to be stable.

Developing in an unrelated language is unlikely to help.

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