It's really uncanny how Gary Bernhardt predicted it all [0] a few years ago. [0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Repeating what I wrote here [1], Fabrice Bellard wrote JSLinux in 2011, which is a CPU emulator written in JavaScript that runs the Linux kernel (using typed arrays and relying on fast JITs). That's just a way of saying that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" (and do so before people who were "predicting" it). If you knew about asm.js and Google's (now abandoned) Nacl and PNacl, there's nothing surp…
The talk isn't trying to sell itself as 100% original. It makes reference to asm.js and a game demo that already existed at the time of the talk as well as repl.it.
Despite that, I do think it makes a unique insight that even though JavaScript is ubiquitous, it will NOT be the language that future languages compile to, but rather a bytecode perhaps inspired by JavaScript that will be the language of the future. Also, importantly this bytecode will win; that is most languages will the ability to directly compile to or have a VM in this bytecode.
Moreover this bytecode has the potential to entirely supplant native code and can do so with equal or better performance.
At least to me, neither of those were obvious insights even though I knew of these plugins and JSLinux.
First off, those plugins died. Silverlight, ActiveX, Java on the web, Flash, all of these died out and were replaced by JavaScript before wasm really took off. It might've looked like the end state would be a version of JavaScript "winning."
Second, things like PNacl, Emscripten, etc. still seemed like curiosities (as the talk refers to when showing Repl.it). It wasn't clear that they or the ideas they championed would get widespread adoption.
These days it is looking more and more likely that wasm is going to become a target for all sorts of different compilers. The fact that it's a major compilation target of Rust, a language that's about as far away from what I would've thought of as a language for the web as possible, is striking.
And though we're still a long ways away from running everything on WebAssembly, it no longer seems as exotic an idea as it once did to me.
And because of that, as well as the fantastic presentation, I still return to this talk every so often awed at how much closer we are to realizing Metal.
There's still a lot of room for the talk to go very wrong, but it's not as far-fetched as when I first watched it.
EDIT: Put another way; the talk is interesting to me because it emphasizes the birth and death of JavaScript. It talks about a world where the same forces that propelled JavaScript to towering heights of popularity ultimately cast it aside and create a world not possible without JavaScript, but in which JavaScript itself essentially no longer exists.