And, while more of a personal opinion, JavaScript is not a well designed language - permanently shackling the web to it prevents progress forward.
There’s a balance between disruptive change and keeping these folks on board. Get it wrong and you’ll end up with it strangled in its cradle.
My own take is that low-code platforms will continue aggressively moving into this space, especially in the enterprise space. They come with their own problems and are often aggressively overhyped, but they will put pressure on “traditional” developers to move faster and look for better solutions.
I do not see a problem here. The idea is not to replace js (not realistic anyway), but to have a full working alternative to not have to use js anymore, so in the end you can really choose how to build for the web.
I also invested heavily into js ... but I am really looking forward to the day, I can use something sane again.
Personally I’m quite happy to blame them. If I want to do ML I use Python, if I do statistics I use R, for messing with Windows I use C#, for using databases I use SQL and for the web I use JavaScript. I think that refusing to learn other languages is a foolish consistency.
Also TIMI on IBM i, language environments on z/OS, among other examples.
> More than 20 programming tools vendors offer some 26 programming languages — including C++, Perl, Python, Java, COBOL, RPG and Haskell — on .NET.
Taken from https://news.microsoft.com/2001/10/22/massive-industry-and-d...
In 2001.
At first it seems like an impressive list of languages! But upon closer inspection, over half of them are either abandoned or are commercial products that have been coasting mostly unmaintained for a decade... By now even the JVM ecosystem is a lot healthier.
With WebAssembly, all languages[1] supported by LLVM can be compiled with no custom compiler nonsense. AND we get all the languages[2] that depend on those languages for free as well! The entire burden is on LLVM (and soon GCC) with everything benefiting downstream, surely you can see how it's different from CLI/JVM?
This time the compile-once-run-everywhere promise might actually be true.
1. C, C++, Zig, Rust, etc 2. Python, Perl, PHP, Lua, we can even do some inception with webassembly runtimes.
Or the money from all those VC firms betting the farm on Webassembly startups will dry out.
Until someone comes up with yet another bytecode format, claiming yet again to be UNCOL from 1958.
You can do that without WASM. This really reinforces the authors point.
https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...
Blazor lets you build web apps using C#. It achieves that by running C# inside WebAssembly.
With wasm-GC, blazor should get way faster and smaller. And the blazor-(JS & DOM) bridge can be massively simplified too. I don't see any good reason for blazor apps to be any larger than the equivalent react app. And that will make it a much more viable platform.
It may get there eventually, but as with most C# things these days, it’s mostly meant to sell other Microsoft products to the horde of developers who view themselves as single language developers. The real risk isn’t so much in the technology, however, it’s in whether or not Microsoft abandons it before it’s good like they have with their previous GUI frameworks going all the way back to ASP classic. I know that angular made a big leap from JS to TS, but aside from that, your major JS frameworks have been fairly stable in the same time frame that Microsoft has gone through web forms, mvc, razor, whatever the hell the web-api bundled with X period was and now Blazor, and what is the most telling of all is how virtually every Microsoft Office365 product is written in JS. Would you really bet on a semi-shitty technology that doesn’t even see adoption within the company that makes it? Well, I guess you do considering you’re using C#.
People who think learning JavaScript is a hassle aren't serious programmers, because what they've actually decided is that learning is a hassle, which is a terrible dead-end anti-intellectual attitude, and they've just decided to blame their learning disability on JavaScript. Real programmers learn new things throughout their entire careers.
Yes JavaScript has flaws. But learnability isn't one of them. And WebAssembly certainly isn't any easier to learn or program in than JavaScript. The problem isn't JavaScript, it's uneducable conservative luddites who refuse to learn anything new (or even as old as JavaScript), who think they know it all already and nothing's ever going to change.
So-called programmers who think they never need to learn any other languages or anything new have much worse flaws than the languages and tools they refuse to learn.
Its much easier to make wasm good. Let Go programmers use go to make websites. Why not? If its any consolation, they'll still need to learn HTML and CSS in the process. Javascript isn't going anywhere if they want to make the switch later.
ChatGPT is not just useful for banging out boilerplate code, it's much more useful for teaching programmers who are willing to learn new apis and how to code in new languages and better in the languages they already know.
And that opportunity is missed on monolinguistic coders who refuse to learn or even read the fucking manual, and just see AI as a replacement for posting "just give me the codes" and copying and pasting from Stack Overflow.
Real programmers aren't going to be replaced by AI. Programmers who refuse to use AI and refuse to learn are going to be replaced by AI and programmers who are capable and enthusiastic about learning.
And according to my experience, WebAssembly is not a game changer: it does not provide extra performance here, neither does it allow to get smaller binaries. I'm a developer of another Java-to-JavaScript compiler, TeaVM. I recently compared performance of JavaScript and WebAssembly targets, and in one particular case WebAssembly is slower: https://teavm.hashnode.dev/comparing-teavm-with-kotlinjs-pef.... There's another example where WebAssembly is only slighly better: https://teavm.org/gallery/jbox2d/index.html. In both cases WebAssembly binary is huge compared to JavaScript. On one hand this can be because of I don't target Wasm GC, so binaries get bloated because of need to maintain shadow stack. On another hand, there's Google Closure Compiler, which produces Wasm GC binaries, and from what I heard of it, WebAssembly binaries still don't win in their size.
I think a lot of people want it to be a replacement for JavaScript. And I think that makes sense, if for no other reason than learning JavaScript is a hassle. Lots of folks think of themselves as a C# developer, or a Python developer or whatever. A lot of developers would rather make websites in their language of choice than learn JavaScript. (And who can blame them?). Webassembly (with GC bindings) should be able to make that possible.