I have serious doubts that WebAssembly is really going to come to dominate the web the way many people here seem to believe it will.

The idea that all of sudden there is going to be a rush to push compiled/closed sites after so many very successful years of using free-and-open stacks seems rather non-logical to me.

Time will tell.

The success of the JavaScript stack was not dependent on source being shipped to the browser, and the push for WebAssembly​ is not motivated by keeping source away from the browser.

What? It absolutely was. Whole generations of today's JS people trained themselves with View Source.

....decompiling minified Javascript?

Sorry, this ship has sailed.

That was before minification. I think that ship already sailed.

> The idea that all of sudden there is going to be a rush to push compiled/closed sites after so many very successful years of using free-and-open stacks seems rather non-logical to me.

Well, then we have minified JS that isn't exactly readable. Similarly with multiple-compiled JSX-to-ES6-to-ES5/JS code.

Also, there's a number of JS obfuscators, whose main purpose is to smuggle a piece of closed code into those theoretically “free-and-open” stacks.

Thus, I think, after wasm becomes generally supported, there will be more incentive to write code in your language of choice and compile it to a common platform, than to write code in JS or one of its derivatives and minify/compile it anyway.

I see your point. But I'm more optimistic. We devs like to jump on hype trains. We only need one good reason to do so.

>"compiled/closed sites"

It's worth noting WebAssembly isn't compiled into a form only computers can understand. There are plans to offer 'View Source'-style functionality for WebAssembly. WASM is a compressed AST rather than hardware-specific bytecode.

> Besides, languages that target WebAssembly are almost certainly going to evolve to fit that space.

And are already but now targeting JS. Like PureScript, ReasonML, Elm and even TypeScipt to some extend.