It sounds like a dream, but going back towards interpreted JS instead of JIT may finally stem the insanity of bloat that JS has evolved in an environment of increasingly fast implementations.

The problem of Javascript bloat doesn't have a technical solution.

Javascript bloat exists because of a social problem: the guy who fixes the corporate webpage's javascripts is called a "webdesigner", and "webdesigners" are the lowest rung on the corporate IT ladder, maybe only a bit above first-tier techsupport.

If you want to make some sort of career you need to upgrade from "webdesigner" to "frontend developer", and that means cryptic, incomprehensible and pointless "frontend frameworks".

It provides to value to business or users, but management puts up with it because it fixes the problem of employee churn. (Frontend positions are a big pain in the ass.)

I posit something even simpler. JavaScript bloat exists because it's easy to learn and put something real on a screen for a newb, and it's a pleasure to write in. Writing these frameworks/libraries/websites/whatevers is literally its own reward, and the barrier to sharing tools is low. That, coupled with enthusiastic developers across the entire spectrum of niavete and experience finding new tools fun and exciting to develop and use, and you have an ecosystem with endemic bitrot. It feels absurd to have to say this, but the people who are a part of this ecosystem and contribute to the bloat do not despise the ecosystem the way HN people seem to. They don't see it as broken. It's not going away.

We do see it as broken, but we see the actual thing that is broken - the web as an application platform.

Since that isn't getting fixed any time soon, most people have tried to take matters into their own hands, with varying degrees of success.

> The problem of Javascript bloat doesn't have a technical solution.

It would go away in short order if Google rankings severely penalised it.

In fairness, that's not a technical solution.

That's true.

>Javascript bloat exists because of a social problem

JS bloat exists because HTML Working Group along with the whole industry believes JS is the solution to everything. They believe everything on the web should be Web Apps, and completely neglect Web Page development. It was only in the recent 2 two years did we start seeing discussions to reverse course.

But JavaScript bloat is allowed to stay (by product managers, middle managers, UX designers, etc) because the website is still fast. If the JS bloat actually caused the site to become too slow on fast machines, people with power to change stuff would demand change.

People with the power to change stuff thought Java applets were a good idea in 1995, when most computers in wide circulation could barely run the JVM at any acceptable speed.

Never trust the tech industry to make optimal decisions, you are only in for a bad time.

Management can't make these sorts of decisions.

They can set metrics on quality, but those can be easily gamed. (E.g. measuring average TTFB for a site instead of the real wall time to show visible content for the user.)

Management has the power to say that something isn't good enough and make it a priority. They also have the power to hire employees or consultants if the current team isn't capable of doing it.

Project management _definitely_ has the power to dedicate time to fixing performance issues.

Metrics can be gamed, but certain metrics - such as time to interactive, and time to fully loaded - are fairly well in line with what users actually care about. Even if they're gamed, a project manager can say, "This still feels slow to use. Dedicate the next (sprint|cycle|month|whatever) to performance work."

Once JIT is disabled, webapps are no longer viable. Which means we can start to deprecate features content-based websites don't need, and eventually, JS itself.

No reason to insult web developers in general. The simpler explanation is that webapps exist because of an economical problem: that you can make more money (have lower barriers) by either recurring payments for services, or by selling your user's attention, or both.

I do lots of frontend development myself, so I'm a kind of "web developer" as well. And I'm insulting web frameworks, not webapps in general.

It is a technical problem. Fix the platform by enabling the writing of modular code with controlled, scoped imports and exports between html, css and JS, and you'll see the bloat go away.

That would pretty much instantly kill the web, no matter how lean they make websites.

I assure you, there are large parts of the web that do not use excessive amounts of javascript.

An insignificant portion of a very huge thing can be large.