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WASM isn't about performance. It is about writing applications in any language and importing those applications into an island in a web page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about BuckleScript?
My impression with Scala.js is that it's nice (and maybe the best option going at the moment) but you're still kind of a second-class citizen, which I'm hoping WASM will change. I imagine the experience with BuckleScript would be similar. (Whereas Typescript feels a lot more first-class, but at the cost of having to still be semantically very close to Javascript).
I wonder if the performance gain is worth the effort. Surely you can always squeeze more performance from JS like from any other language but what's the point if you spend hours to match the performance you get for "free" from other languages? As far as WASM is concerned I'm more excited about the possibility to run any programming language on the web than the raw performance gains. So far it is still year(s) away fr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My impression with Scala.js is that it's nice (and maybe the best option going at the moment) but you're still kind of a second-class citizen, which I'm hoping WASM will change. I imagine the experience with BuckleScript would be similar. (Whereas Typescript feels a lot more first-class, but at the cost of having to still be semantically very close to Javascript).
I am looking into TypeScript right now and I think it's just a hard problem to integrate a typed language into a dynamic environment like JavaScript. The transitions between JavaScript and the typed language will always be tricky and error prone.
I wonder if the performance gain is worth the effort. Surely you can always squeeze more performance from JS like from any other language but what's the point if you spend hours to match the performance you get for "free" from other languages? As far as WASM is concerned I'm more excited about the possibility to run any programming language on the web than the raw performance gains. So far it is still year(s) away fr…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am looking into TypeScript right now and I think it's just a hard problem to integrate a typed language into a dynamic environment like JavaScript. The transitions between JavaScript and the typed language will always be tricky and error prone.
Typescript does a better job than most that I've seen.
I'm excited about compiling to WASM not for performance but for correctness. Typescript is better than nothing but it really can't compete with the safety and ease you get from a language with a really good type system.
I thought all the benchmarks indicated that WASM is still slower than JS. That being said the only performance improvements offered by WASM is if it doesn't for garbage collection for consistence execution. WASM isn't about performance. It is about writing applications in any language and importing those applications into an island in a web page.
You don't really need wasm for that, do you? Anything compiles to JS nowadays and you'd actually get easier access to the DOM and GC and support for source maps (are those working for wasm yet?)
So much work to achieve what should be default behavior :-/ How did we end up in wasting so much time on trivialities?
Then MS gave us AJAX and 37 signals made it popular, until apps like gmail made it so mainstream it was impossible to go back to old static pages.
But it was too late. The shitty language we had was the only one available everywhere to do dynamic web pages now.
IE would not move, and Firefox and Opera were the underdog, spending their resources on more important things. So nobody tried to implement a better existing language.
When Google faced the challenge of creating chrome, they had to be compatible. So instead of implementing a better language, they also used JS, and injected millions of dollars into making the V8 so it has decent performances.
After that, JS was usable, and so we moved on.