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I hope we don't move in that direction. It would be a waste of perfectly fine CPU cycles and memory. Admittedly natively built modules pose a tooling challenge but we've been doing that for decades. WebAssembly could serve as a cross-platform fallback.



> It would be a waste of perfectly fine CPU cycles and memory

If history teaches us anything, is that we WILL move in that direction.


Programmers time is still worth much more than cpu time ...


That argument makes sense when we're talking about languages that improve productivity at the cost of efficiency, but consider that we are now talking specifically about code already written in a compiled language. There is no need to run say, libpng, in a virtual machine outside the browser.


You could upload wasm to npm and distribute code like that, no need to compile it on target machine. While node.js generally does not have problems with that I've seen missing tools/MS Build on Windows machines.


That used to be kind of true, but now # cycles/sec has hit a brick wall.




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