> You language choice shouldn't determine your infrastructure.
Of course. I am a js dev and work mostly with nodejs. However, I would push back here and say that JS is the only real choice for web development as you must code for a browser which most often interprets html/css and js. So not surprisingly, and especially with the proliferation of nodejs, all the people writing code for the web are javascript programmers. React, Angular, VueJS, Meteor ect all provide rich javascript frameworks/libs for writing web applications and a full stack can be written with a single language.
My point is that asm.js seems to provide a lot of leverage as an option and internet speed and machi ne resources also are improving. I would not say that the web, the browser or the current situation is ideal-- far from it, but webassembly seems like a very small improvement patch. It basically allows games devs who want to code specifically for the non-mobile browser to have slightly better performance by learning a very obtuse new language paradigm that is brand new.
- It doesn't improve on marking up apps in IBM markup language from the 60s which was originally developed for research papers.
- It doesn't improve security. I think it may actually be net bad for security given the obfuscation.
- It is targeted at a very narrow community
- It is largely embraced and championed by people who do not currently write web apps. It is unclear if their enthusiasm will carry over to them actually coding in it.
The web ecosstem is horribly broken. I would love something as innovative as javascript to come along again, when Eich put Scheme into the browser people were very excited. They could do something new and 10x better than previously possible. Given that there are such glaring problems in with the web right now (and I do admit performance is one of them) this marginal improvement, if indeed it proliferates and in fact does improve things, seems so minimal at a pretty steep cost to learn it, that I don't find it exciting and expect it to have virtually no impact.
They should do so much more than this. Imagine even if browser companies put a python or ruby interpreter (or even a native c++ one) into the browser. Imagine all the possiblities of adding natice scss support, limiting or removing very old unused feature support and refactoring the codebases. ect. Imagine not using 1960s era research paper syntax to write a web app. There is so much room for improvement that making something that requires me (and so many others) how to write applications for very little benefit will be met with crickets. or extreme enthusiasm from people who don't write web apps and never will, but find it reminiscient of their mem-mgmt c-like language they use for mobile or systems programming.