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Proposal: JavaScript Structs

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Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#21

Post by pjmlp »

leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

C23 has just been ratified, and C2y has already quite a few proposals.

Programming languages are like any other software product, evolution or stagnation.

Eventually they might implode, however whatever comes after will follow the same cycle yet again.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#23

Post by pjmlp »

connicpu wrote: post #7

The general idea of types with a fixed layout seems great, but I'm a lot more dubious about the idea of unsafe blocks. The web is supposed to be a sandbox where we run untrusted code and with pretty good certainty expect that it can't crash the computer. Allowing untrusted code to specify "hey let me do stuff that can cause data races if not done correctly" is just asking for trouble, and also exploits. If shared str…

That was gone with GPU access and WebAssembly.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#24

Post by throw49sjwo1 »

leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

> And nobody uses most of it!

Everybody who does Express, React, or any other popular advanced libraries with TypeScript is using these features. Some things are simply more useful to libraries than line of business code - that's fine. The line of business code is much better thanks to it.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#25

Post by adamc »

leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

Java went through this too, although there, a lot of it is part of the ecosystem. See https://chrisdone.com/posts/tamagotchi-tooling/

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#26

Post by nosefurhairdo »

throw49sjwo1 wrote: post #24
leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

> And nobody uses most of it! Everybody who does Express, React, or any other popular advanced libraries with TypeScript is using these features. Some things are simply more useful to libraries than line of business code - that's fine. The line of business code is much better thanks to it.

Yeah I was confused by this point as well. Especially because many of the recent Typescript releases are just improving performance or handling more cases (without needing to learn new syntax).

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#27

Post by afavour »

leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

I think in this specific case it's JavaScript's requirement for backwards compatibility that bloats it... but there's a lot you can ignore. Like, you can declare a variable with var, let or const but there's absolutely no reason to use var any more. I feel similarly about the proposals to introduce records and tuples: https://github.com/tc39/proposal-record-tuple... in most scenarios you'll probably be better off using records rather than objects, and maybe that's what folks will end up doing.

But boy does it all get confusing.

> Now, Typescript is on version 5.6 and there is so much stuff you can do with it that it's overwhelming. And nobody uses most of it!

I'm not so sure about that. I think we end up consuming a lot of these features in the TS types that get published alongside libraries. We just don't know it, we just get surprisingly intuitive type interfaces.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#28

Post by tannhaeuser »

throw49sjwo1 wrote: post #24
leetharris wrote: post #18

I am not sure how to really refine this thought I have had, but I have this fear that every language eventually gets so bloated and complicated that it has a huge barrier to entry. The ones that stand out the most to me are C# and Typescript. Microsoft has a large team dedicated towards improving these languages constantly and instead of exclusively focusing on making them easier to use or more performant, they are c…

> And nobody uses most of it! Everybody who does Express, React, or any other popular advanced libraries with TypeScript is using these features. Some things are simply more useful to libraries than line of business code - that's fine. The line of business code is much better thanks to it.

React and Expressjs predate typescript, Expressjs considerably so.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#29

Post by johnfn »

modeless wrote: post #15
bastawhiz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me when browsers support another language. What are we going to use? CSS?

wasm "but wasm has to call JavaScript to use browser APIs" WasmGC is shipped in Chrome and Firefox and enabled by default in WebKit nightly

Let me know when WASM has a dev workflow that gets a change to your browser 1/10th as fast as Vite + TypeScript + React.

Re: Proposal: JavaScript Structs

#30

Post by throw49sjwo1 »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #28
throw49sjwo1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And nobody uses most of it! Everybody who does Express, React, or any other popular advanced libraries with TypeScript is using these features. Some things are simply more useful to libraries than line of business code - that's fine. The line of business code is much better thanks to it.

React and Expressjs predate typescript, Expressjs considerably so.

Doesn't matter, I'm talking about the type definitions - @types/react, @types/react-dom and @types/express.
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