That takes out Microsoft and Google from that list. Also, ‘whomever’ already had its opportunity with Java.

So one could conclude the wait is for Apple with Swift. But would they want that? I think they would rather see people write iOS-specific apps in Swift.

Of course there may be another 'whomever'. Facebook with Hack, perhaps? Their advantage may be that they aren’t big in hardware or operating systems, but I still think they are too big and therefore deemed too dangerous by the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

I think the only way is for some small player to come out of nowhere and somehow take the world by storm, probably, as you say, by riding on top of WebAssembly.

(by the way, I don’t think WebAssembly will be the leveller that allows everybody to pick his own language to develop in for the web. I think we will see some high-level API in WebAssembly develop that fits one language better than others. Of course, we could again choose to make “C” that language and that way allow almost any language interface with any other language through a crude interface, but I would hope we can do better by now)

Typescript transpiles to Javascript - its purpose is to allow static type-checking of regular Javascript code by dev tools, prior to transpilation.

AFAIK It has no features which would benefit from being used at runtime and there's never been any intention to run it straight in the browser. (If I'm wrong please correct me)

If WebAssembly doesn't get proper support for tail call optimization, then IMO it's not the way forward. Right now it's listed as a future feature[1] so color me skeptical.

[1] https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FutureFeat...