> In fact, what you’d end up with would look remarkably similar to the dev process for a Java applet!
Yeah, it's increasingly clear to me that Java was just 20 years ahead of its time. Java really would make a great front end language.
People lament the complexity and size of the JVM... But these days V8 is just as bad. The complexity is a trade-off for runtime performance.
It's compiled into a compact easy to parse bitcode format similar to WASM. It's faster than JS and shares many basic design decisions. The packaging system is and always was basically a better version of NPM. It has pretty good cross-platform UI, probably the best there is outside of QT.
WASM apps are eventually going to be built identically to Java cross-platform desktop apps. Probably using Java, Go, C#
I hope not. The world is finally waking up to the need for sum types. A big part of the reason Java is so hated for doing simple things in is that lacking sum types meant it had to implement a horrible "checked exception" system.
Hoo boy it was awesome to work with. But. It came out at the wrong time. Linux was coming up as a desktop, MS was still evil. Mono was mostly a hobby project.
The backlash of trying to use "proprietary M$ crap" for web was too big of a hurdle to cross, even if the technology behind Silverlight was lightyears ahead of the drek that was Java Applets.
I feel like the mistake Java made was ceding the DOM to Javascript. It turned out that users like the browser and didn't particularly want either native widgets or a new system. The browser is familiar and good enough for a vast majority of tasks.
If the JVM had access to the DOM, you could write SPAs in Java and everybody would be happy. Instead Java sealed itself off separately from the browser, and Javascript went from little toys to full-blown UI applications. And then developers wanted to use the same code on both client and server so they made Node, working in the space where Java is so much clearly better.
So we end up with the worse language running the world. Fortunately, JS has finally become a mediocre language (or even a decent one with TS), and here we are.
I think it was just that shipping native apps on a web page was too slow back then for the internet and the machines. For the web to grow, it had to be simple. It took almost 20 years before we looped back to running full applications in the browser
Yeah, it's increasingly clear to me that Java was just 20 years ahead of its time. Java really would make a great front end language.
People lament the complexity and size of the JVM... But these days V8 is just as bad. The complexity is a trade-off for runtime performance.
It's compiled into a compact easy to parse bitcode format similar to WASM. It's faster than JS and shares many basic design decisions. The packaging system is and always was basically a better version of NPM. It has pretty good cross-platform UI, probably the best there is outside of QT.
WASM apps are eventually going to be built identically to Java cross-platform desktop apps. Probably using Java, Go, C#