Perhaps I misunderstood
your point. You seemed to ask why people would want to use JS once WASM effectively
puts it on a level playing field with other languages.
Ah nah, I meant more like - if you wanted to, why wouldn't you. Not that anything is explicitly better than anything else.
It sounded like people were claiming that WASM cannot dethrone JS, that JS will always be the language of the web, etcetc. So my question was more.. Why?
Personally I don't think it is (clearly haha). Once DOM access is reasonable, I think many (myself included) will move away quickly. Web frameworks are not that hard, so the existing ecosystem of languages is a bit of a meaningless argument as I see it. Hell, even within JS, the ecosystem is largely isolated solos of code. Eg, sure I can choose between React, Angular, Ember, etcetc - but I wouldn't choose two of them at the same time. The ecosystem in that case only helps me in that I can choose, but they're rarely tools I collectively use.
So back to my original point, myself, and I imagine my shop, would make the switch pretty quickly as soon as WASM is viable for our target languages. Viable means page load execution, memory, speed, etc - all variable parameters depending on the project of course.
> It sounded like people were claiming that WASM cannot dethrone JS, that JS will always be the language of the web, etcetc. So my question was more.. Why?
You seem to be missing the biggest (at least to me) advantage of JS - how dumb it is.
It's great that beginners don't have much to learn. They do not need any complex environment setup. And even seniors get benefit of easy onboarding.
And considering web will always be primarily about UI i.e. high level code writable by any random guy without CS degree, why would JS lose its dominance?
Being the top language and being the goto might be different though.. although I'm not sure how to properly word the two, but what I mean is:
A goto language is the language that most people are going to use because of the benefits for the problem domain. Eg, you're not going to write an embedded device application with a GC language like JS/Py/Go/etc. You're far better off with a low level, low memory and predictable language.
Right now, JS is the goto for the web. It's actually not the only "choice", transpilers exist for many languages to JS, but it slows the app down, increases size, etc. So while people have options, the disadvantages of other Langs on the web make JS the goto.
Saying that JS will no longer be the goto (or however you want to word it) doesn't mean people will stop using JS any more than embedded systems not using Python hurts Python. But it does mean people have options, and JS is a language of choice now, not requirement. At least, that's my dream - hopefully WASM provides that.
