Regardless of arguments for and against whether this is a good idea, market pressure to open floodgates to other languages will be far too high to ignore.
My prediction is that WASM will quickly evolve into a new way to containerize applications, very close to a full-fledged VM/OS. The market constantly demands more features and faster execution. The only logical conclusion is that the web browser will become an operating system.
The market wants people to want "more features and faster execution." The market doesn't care what it's selling per se. If the web-browser-as-OS seems like an inevitability in that context, it's only a side-effect, and one that could change at any time.
WASM also impacts the labor market, as you mention. But it's not, as we might like to believe, because programmers' demands for more freedom and expressive power are being honored; it's because, as monkmartinez suggests [0] (and maybe this is what you mean by "floodgates"), companies would rather not be limited to a smaller human-resource pool when developing web properties.
If I sound a little dystopian, it might be because I'm currently reading Cyber-Marx [1], an insightful book from 1999 about the "information revolution" and its relation to capital.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14342983
[1] http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/66mwg3pc9780252...
Almost all of the popular programming language have a js transpiler allowing programmers to code in their lang and use it on web.
I think the reasons why programmers aren't using their preference when coding for web is, firstly because of the lack industry approval/support and secondly the speed of development. As much I complain about writing js code, it's a lot faster to get things done compared to Rust/C++.
The transpilers don't work that great and don't produce standard bytecode, in this regard WASM will be a game changer.
Because transpilers are an incredibly leaky abstraction. You have to know your language, the language you're transpiling to and quite often you need to know about how that translation occurs.
That's before you even get into the idiomatic differences between languages and libraries.
You can write a native app in pretty much any language that can sit on top of the current web stack—but from the perspective of most programming languages, the result is very non-idiomatic code. Not only do you have to avoid consuming most of the library ecosystem of your language; you also have to code in the "Javascript style", with co-operatively scheduled async tasks running in a single execution-thread context (plus maybe some memory-isolated "secondary process"-like execution-threads you have to do message-passing IPC against) in order to make your native code "work" in a web browser after transpilation.
If we clear that hurdle, using arbitrary languages for the web will be a lot easier, and you'll see far more porting of native apps to the web.
† https://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/porting/pthre...
The browser is one of the only truly cross platform development environments around. The popularity of the browser is directly coupled to that fact in my opinion. How many developers|companies and organizations would be over the moon excited with hiring a Python|Ruby|Lua|Rust|C# developer that could talk natively to the browser? My guess is a LOT.
On the other hand, "keep up with JS" is something of a misnomer here. It's not javascript that's moving super-fast, it's the web ecosystem (plus the node one, in parallel). It's moving fast because new ideas are evolving at speed (functional-reactive approaches, new ways to think about mixins vs multiple inheritance, etc), and those ideas lead to new framework architectures gaining popularity as they exploit these new ways of thinking about organizing data flow through a complicated system.
Couple that with some baseline things that aren't changing here - you're still going to have to interact with the DOM, you aren't going to magically get re-entrant multithreading, and the event model isn't changing. There's still going to be a lot about web programming that feels different from systems programming, and things are still going to move quickly. Probably even more quickly (but I'm not certain about that - I imagine one major reason JS shifts quickly is that it has so many programmers working with it, if the population fragments there will probably be a number of slow-moving communities that neither shift often nor take advantage of new features, which feels like the kind of neophile - neophobe split that's already apparent in different areas of programming).
So: I am not convinced that a (say) rust or go compiler to WASM will suddenly make front-end programming feel like systems programming. It'll be a new language, sure, but there's a lot more to web development and the (reasonable) complaints people have about a shifting landscape than just javascript and its funky definition of OO and triple equals sign.
Paralyzation due to choice and only so much time to evaluate each framework. Couple that to "staying" power, that is, will this library be around in 6 months? I have taken a peek from time to time and been thoroughly aghast at the volume and not really seeing any of the old stand-bys around.
Now compare that to Python. There is no dearth of choice and one will find many of these choices have been around for more than a decade. They have evolved and changed of course, but not anywhere near the pace of JS. Again, I could take a 3 to 6 month break from looking at Python news and libraries... then come back and jump right into most of the libs I already know. Can a JS dev do that?
> Couple that with some baseline things that aren't changing here
Doesn't webASM give the power to abstract those things away? React creates a virtual DOM, right? Why can't Python create a virtual DOM via webASM?
I stand with you in that I agree things are going to move quickly once Python and others become peers with JS in the browser. I am sure it will be insane as everyone figures out which lib will have staying power like Django, or similar in another lang. I do think that people who generally gravitate toward languages like Python, Go, C#, Java will bring those attitudes with them... that is, they aren't going to re-invent the wheel every three months unless there is a super compelling reason to do so.
I think, though, that you could pretty easily take a break from JS dev and come back and still use the tools you had six or twelve months ago, just fine. For example, I maintain a pretty big angular 1 application that has a lot of pre-1.4 code in it. It runs fine, and I haven't touched my build tooling in over a year. There's still a lot of very relevant questions and answers on stackoverflow and so on.
Now, I may well want to use react or angular4 or something else for my next project, but nothing is stopping me from using angular 1, or backbone, or just plain jquery for that matter. They all still work.
As to the virtual DOM - abstraction libraries are really cool (although the vDOM isn't really that), but they introduce just yet another thing that changes over time. At the end of the day, the DOM is a pretty complicated thing, between its own structure, event models, css, and everything else, so the API to interact with it is going to be complicated no matter what language you use. Most frameworks (backbone, jquery, angular, react, etc) are all just different attempts to manage that complication, and all they ever really do is shove the complication from one place to another, but (for example with functional reactive models) that other place is something a group of people is willing to deal with.
Looks like Docker/Unikernel Systems actually has plans to build something like this: https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit/tree/master/projects/mi...
* Java was plagued with security problems. One area where Java really shot itself in the foot was that unsigned applets were sandboxed, but signed applets had unfettered access to everything, so you had to choose between signing and sandboxing. And then once security concerns became a big thing, Sun responded by killing support for unsigned applets saying it'll increase trust, but what they really did was make the problem worse by killing the sandbox.
* Java was proprietary until long after its star had fallen.
* Java was introduced when computers weren't that powerful. The JVM took forever to start up and would slow down your whole computer while running. Most of us kept Java disabled unless we had to use an applet for something just because of the massive performance hit.
You can make similar arguments about Flash, too: it too had security holes, proprietary software, and performance issues.
There is one thing I really liked about Java and Flash, though: you could turn it off. If you don't want a site loading some heavy Flash monstrosity and eating all your RAM (I had so many issues with Flash killing the RAM on my old laptop with only 512 MB of RAM), you could just turn plugins off or install an extension to force you to click to load Flash content. You can't do that with JavaScript, so maybe WASM will bring that part of the old days back too.
NoScript?
Was there any point in the development of WASM where it made more sense to develop WASM to replace the JVM than it would have made to try fixing the problems with the JVM? Are we at that point now? It sounds like the last two problems fixed themselves.
Basically, it's a lot of the same stuff, but a (hopefully) better implementation, and promoted in a way that appeals to the people likely to use it. Start with an old technology. Tweak, relabel, and market under the new name.
But Javascript's dynamically typed textual representation has nothing to do with what makes it better than Java applets. It's the security model, which wasm shares.
So WASM is a great tool, but not a good choice for building something like HN, where perf isn't an issue. Iteration speed, debuggability, and the GC make HTML/CSS/JS a better choice here.
It seems to me that the history of computing so far can be summarized as "due to popular demand, things have been used far outside their creator's intended scope, with 3-4 non-horrible results".
(Lisp is definitely one, can't think of another on the top of my head).
We could have had Lisp instead of JS, but no, that would have worked too well; management wants Java. We almost had a Scheme instead of CSS: DSSSL, which could also do structural transformations of the document tree. But once again, no. The simplicity multiplied by the flexibility of a Lisp, equaled unacceptable complexity, for some strange definition of complexity.
XML looks like it really, really wanted to be a Lisp, what with its orderly nesting of tags. I almost wonder if XML stumbled and fell, due to the supporting pillars of parens being knocked out or corrupted, left, right and center.
Better to develop something for "performance" that just happens to be able to replace JS as a side benefit. Makes it a lot easier to swallow
There's the Alan Kay attitude that we can build entire systems on top of minimal VM's, rather than sacrificing power to bake in more facilities. But even he says that too much time has been wasted by teams reinventing the wheel (or flat tire) who didn't really have the chops to do it.
The other side of that, then, is the great potential for interop that Javascript offers. We now have a worldwide platform with a built-in presentation layer and a highly-optimized interpreter with useful, reflectable data structures out of the box. (edit i.e. it's a viable platform for metaprogramming... the endgame of which is JS-in-JS (see "prepack")).
I would love to see a future in which the browser (and "personal" computer generally) remained a locus of significant computation. In practice, I suspect that highly-intensive tasks (mostly AI stuff) will continue to be done on servers, not because we lack the processing power, but because end users will have signed away the custody of all data worth processing. If that is the case, then WASM's role will be to fill a fairly marginal gap, between what JS can do, and what has to be farmed out anyway.
So ultimately I hope that WASM offers a lifeline to the computing power that individuals still have. But given the state of JS (after huge investments), it feels like starting over again.