The wasm folks will add gc, polymorphic inline cache, dom interop, some time soon. That will enable things like browser side Perl, Python, Go, Ruby, etc, without having to push the whole runtime.

Nonetheless, the bloat train will resume at that point. And, the frontend will start having the same amount of fragmentation as the backend.

Good news for us, though, is job security. The resulting complexity helps us, at least in one way.

Web apps will be on equal footing and fragmentation as the old client/server model (vb, powerbuilder, delphi, c/x11/motif, visual c++ / mfc, dart/flutter, etc).

What comes around, goes around. The cyclic nature is pretty funny.

> And, the frontend will start having the same amount of fragmentation as the backend.

Err, I think that boat has already sailed?...

E.g. Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, make, Parcel, Brunch, Browserify, etc, etc, etc.

As far as tooling, sure. But this will take it up a level to base language. Surely that's an exponential difference?

Frontend dev won't mean what it means today.

You mean like Dart, Elm, Haxe and whatever else already compiles to javascript?

Not sure any of those have the mindshare of the languages wasm will eventually enable.

> Good news for us, though, is job security. The resulting complexity helps us, at least in one way.

I don't think I despise an incentive as much as this one, even if it is a natural side-effect, not intentional. It's the reason why large and top-heavy bureaucratic organizations end up being a net-negative as a result of their structure. Despite their well intentioned attempts at 'fixing' the bumps in the road that natural free flowing systems generate, with top-down control and extreme risk management.

Instead of fostering common-sense and individual talent, it creates incentives and attracts people who care more about the organization itself, and their position within it, rather than the outcomes and value creation for which the organization was originally created.