JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De... by Udik on Monday September 12, 2016 @02:18PM (#12482235)

I guess you tend to reuse the technologies you're familiar with, especially when they are very well proven for solving a very complicated problem that requires a lot of expertise (I'm talking about fancy UIs, of course).

Which is also why I think the emphasis on JS is wrong: the main selling point of these technologies is NOT javascript, is HTML5/ CSS. Javascript is just a (very handy indeed) scripting language like any other: frankly the logic and requirements of most applications around are not complex enough to justify the usage of anything more solid or complicated than that. Just today I was contacted by a former colleague, a Java developer, asking advice on using Electron to develop a quick desktop application.

On the other hand, there is a long list of languages that transpile to javascript. So where are the masses of serious C#/ Java/ <pick-your-language> developers using transpilers to write the logic of their web applications?

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Re:JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the De... by n00b101 on Monday September 12, 2016 @03:23PM (#12482823)

So where are the masses of serious C#/ Java/ <pick-your-language> developers using transpilers to write the logic of their web applications?

I think it is catching on with C++ game developers, who want to be able to run the same codebase natively or in the web browser. The Unity 3D game engine has built-in support for this using WebGL, for example.

I don't know if CLR or JVM languages have been successfully transpiled to the browser using asm.js / WebAssembly (it wouldn't be very efficient at all, so I doubt that will ever be popular).

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