
What if JavaScript wins? - tosh
https://medium.com/@anildash/what-if-javascript-wins-84898e5341a
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tabtab
JavaScript is too screwy to be the dominant language. It's chalk full of
awkward features. I hope something better becomes the de-facto language.

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ebcode
That's partly why Douglas Crockford wrote his JS book, JavaScript: The Good
Parts, to try and eke out a subset of the language that was better than the
whole. But "better" is always subjective, so I think we'll have to live with
"worse is better" for a while longer, if not indefinitely.

What would you think of WebAssembly becoming the de-facto?

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tabtab
Web-Assembly makes it easier to use a language of a shop's choice. While
choice is often good, it doesn't solve the original problem of a common
standard language in terms of what devs actually use.

Actually using JavaScript (JS) as an assembly language seems the better route
to the same goal. JS client engines can then be optimized for that standard to
get speed, but older or non-optimized clients can still "run" stuff, just not
as fast.

In other words, define a JS sub-language/API as the "assembly" then optimize
clients to run that sub-language faster. The engines may put functions common
to the sub-language in front of the internal function-lookup hashes for speed,
for example. You'd then get the same results as WebAssembly but not "break"
old clients: they'd just run slower than the newer/optimized clients.

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tree_of_item
You're probably aware of asm.js, and that we actually started with what you
described and moved to WebAssembly. Do you think that we're moving in the
wrong direction, then?

