Compiling to WebAssembly: It’s Happening

I would be happy to take a bet that this will not be the case.

The fact is that JS is much easier to learn than C++, has a broader ecosystem in the browser, is faster to write than C++ due to memory safety among other considerations, and is fast enough for app logic.

Think about it. C++ code has been supported for years on mobile. Yet Java/Dalvik is king on Android, and Objective-C is king on iOS. JS is faster than both (in the case of Objective-C, JS property access is faster than Obj-C virtual method dispatch due to ICs). So I see no reason why this will not be true on the Web as well. Web Assembly is very needed and important, but JS won't be going away.

This is about as true as the idea that the only use of seeing source code is debugging (or building/deploying your own version of the app).

Which, of course, every developer here knows is not true.

Reading source code is useful for figuring out how to do something you didn't know how to do. It's useful for discovering idioms you didn't know, even if you already knew another way. It's very useful if you're trying to do bookmarklets/extensions/mashups or even more significantly engineered interop.

I don't know if there's a formal gatekeeper out there with a list of all the things that capital-O Officially make the The Open Web(TM) great, so I guess there's no way to settle what's on it.

But I don't know how anyone could argue that these things weren't significant bullet points in a much longer list of reasons why the web has seen faster and broader adoption than any of the competing VMs and why it was/is often more useful and nice to work with despite more limited capabilities.

And I think it goes almost without saying that list is much bigger than the "no single gatekeeper" point.

> you're fighting against WebAssembly because you are ideologically against black box software

I am neither fighting against WebAssembly nor ideologically against any kind of black box software. My earlier comment makes it clear I think WebAssembly has a place (and, more generally, that transpiling does) as well as its hazards.

I am stepping in to point out that Flash and WebAssembly have significant things in common, some of which are tradeoffs against things that have made the Web an effective and proliferating medium.

> [JS] some important deficiencies with respect to typing and static analysis

See my aside about Elm. Given the fact that dynamic languages (including maligned ones like JS and even PHP) seem to be about as equally successful in terms of shipped software as statically manifest typed languages, whether or not even something like TypeScript is really going to give engineering teams an edge seems like far from a settled question to me. But I'm interested to see what happens where we're talking significantly augmented capabilities rather than the largely aesthetic differences that something like CoffeeScript represents.

(Speaking of which: "TypeScript, Flow, Dart, CoffeeScript"... at least one of these things is not like the others if you're invoking static analysis and typing as reasons for transpiling.)

> You say that other people's problems with JS are "superficial", but that's exactly how I see your problems with WebAssembly.

I can't tell exactly what you're saying here, but at a close approximation, it sounds like you might be suggesting that the readability of WebAssembly is going to be on the same order of difficulty that an experienced Python developer has reading idiomatic human-written JS (ie, aesthetic). This is potentially possible, I guess, in a world where everyone writing compilers that target WebAssembly is conscientious at/above the level that the CoffeeScript developers were (CS output is really fairly readable, arguably more so than minified JS). But then again, that's not what the name suggests WebAssembly is for. In practice, most of the time it's probably going to read... a lot like assembly language dressed in C-like syntax.

Then why isn't the Mac App Store (to name an example) a runaway success?

Er, because that would be really silly.

I like reading HN from time to time. I would never install an app, because I don't use it frequently enough. I definitely would never go through the pain of installing a HN app every time I wanted to read HN. I really doubt I'm alone or even abnormal in that regard.

That's the beauty of a browser: I can be reading HN in under a second when I want to, with no cluttering of my desktop just so I can read HN from time to time.