221–230 of 238 posts
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JS provided that already without WebAssembly, no?
I don't understand why the downvotes , JS is one of the most target languages. Elm,GHJS(Haskell),Purescript,Clojurescript and supersets like Typescript which come with their own toolchains.
My excitement for WASM has nothing to do with speed or efficiency of the runtime. It's all about finally having a universal compile target for the web. We're finally going to be able to develop web apps in a proper language of our own choosing, without needing hacks like TypeScript. Hopefully, this will lead to real dedicated IDE tooling and standardized libraries for the web along the lines of what's available in iO…
Leading to real IDEs, real languages, real libraries. downsides will be some proprietary solutions will crop up.
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GC is just something you implement on the language runtime.
Then you're shipping the entire (or at least large pieces of) language runtime to the client since presumably, you'd need to compile that to WASM as well.
You'll need most of a runtime anyway, since it provides much more than GC.
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GC is just something you implement on the language runtime.
Then you're shipping the entire (or at least large pieces of) language runtime to the client since presumably, you'd need to compile that to WASM as well.
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They decided to use it because it let you add things like drop-down menus (and falling snowflakes!) to your website, which made it look better than your competitor's website. Syntax was just the hoop to jump through to achieve that, and a very minor one at that. I doubt it would have made any difference.
You honestly believe that Javascript would have been equally successful if it had shared similar syntax to, say, Brainfuck? Especially given the alternatives that were available at the time? If syntax doesn't matter, I guess so, but I'm not sure I'm convinced.
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There are a lot of developers -- a huge amount, actually -- who believe memory management is too important to leave to an automated GC algorithm. That, and the memory requirements of a particular application might require something different than a GC provides.
If your algorithm is such that everything can be placed on the stack then GC gets you nothing.
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None of these things are true about MS Office (native - not online 365) right now, which was the specific subject this sub-thread.
You seem to have totally missed what the "specific subject of this sub-thread is". A quick reminder from just the parent comment above to which we're answering: "Imagine MS Word is running in your browser without them having to rewrite it in JS!". That is, we're not talking about the native MS Office "right now".
Improved with respect to what, then, if not the current "right now" Office?
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You underestimate the average programmer's aversion to Lisp syntax, despite it being the clearly superior syntax. If JavaScript had had Lisp syntax, then everyone would still be using Flash. Or some other plugin that provided a language with a more popular syntax.
You underestimate the average programmer's aversion to Lisp syntax, despite it being the clearly superior syntax. IME it's a learned thing from only knowing languages that at least superficially resemble ALGOL. JS is a first language for a lot of people - because their goal was to make a website do something. Scheme would not have been any different.
IME many computer programmers learned Lisp in college and for some reason hated it–I think in part due to the syntax and in part because they had a hard time with recursion and other "mind-bending" concepts. They often still harbor an irrational precedent to this day.
Me, on the other hand, I loved Lisp as soon as I learned it. (Perhaps I was primed by having learned APL in high school.) I changed my major from Astrophysics to Computer Science because I felt that SICP was even cooler than black holes and neutron stars.
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SPAs are still considered too fat. how do you miss the nearly daily "web bloat crisis" stories on HN?
You're probably access web sites sitting at home or office, where you have decent 10+ Mbps channel. All this changes when you travel and you use either slow public WiFi or phone tethering. Yes, there's 4G, but in most places in most countries 4G coverage is very poor: it's only in the most populated areas. I travel between countries and of course I hate staying in huge cities because they're expensive and noisy. But…
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GC is just something you implement on the language runtime.
Then you're shipping the entire (or at least large pieces of) language runtime to the client since presumably, you'd need to compile that to WASM as well.
Obviously if we're trying to run a full JVM or CLR in WebAssembly, that will cause problems, but C# and F# both have compile-to-js targets that would likely just get faster.