Javascript is an interesting language (particularly after it's recent revival), but IMO it's recent jumpstart would never have happened if it weren't for one killer feature: access to the HTML DOM. People would (and have) forgiven many other things, just for the utility of that as the presentation layer.
I certainly would have picked up whatever language the browsers were pushing, where DOM access was a requirement.
Conversely, I remember trying to get java applets to interact with HTML -- you have to message things through a tiny hole to/from javascript; which was (one of the many) things which made everyone hate java applets.
(This is not a criticism of wasm, by the way. It's merely motivating potential future GC extensions to the spec.)
As an aside, JS is standardised by Ecma, as ECMAScript: the W3C doesn't have anything to do with it.
That’d be finally a solution.
Or require source maps by law.
EDIT: Why the downvotes? The only way to preserve the right to modify and decompile in the long term is by creating technical or legal measures enforcing it. JS was one technical measure, so now we need alternatives.
> That’d be finally a solution.
No, it wouldn't. You'd end up with sites shipping "source maps" that map every function to a randomly generated identifier.
What's a "valid" source map anyways?
Furthermore, debugging with sourcemaps is suboptimal. WebAssembly wants to support much better debug information than this.
It’s also intended to allow them to modify it for their own purposes, and provide the modifications to others who have a license to the original product.
Especially on the web this was finally possible, and now you’re suggesting to take this away again?
At most they legally protect someone who decides to run a disassembler or decompiler on a binary from prosecution or lawsuits (but only in as much as you don't use the result to violate copyright or other restrictions).
See Article 6 on http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...
And "copying the decompiled source of the part of MS Word that reads .doc files" counts as covered, so, it's quite a lot.
Especially with websites, where you might want to interact with, or write addons interacting with, WASM threatens those rights.
No need for the DOM anymore... (not saying it's a better approach, but it is technically possible).
There's the next full stack paradigm right there. I give it two years, and it will be called rustic-asm framework...
It's still very early, and there's other avenues as well: an LLVM backend, for example.