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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Why is building an HPC platform on a language designed in less than 2 weeks something to aspire to?

Why not aspire to replace javascript entirely with something better?

...because the goal of the Internet Archive is to get playable versions of archived media into your hands, and Chrome/FF/Safari/Edge/etc represent a powerful & free, execution target that everybody already has.

Besides -- and this is key -- they're not rewriting it in Javascript. Javascript (via Emscripten) is a compile target for the code they already have.

Those who have read the article know this; it's right there in the article:

    I know that it sounds like porting things to Javascript 
    is crazy. I find that people think we’re rewriting things 
    from scratch, instead of using Emscripten, which compiles 
    out to Javascript as a target (and later WebAssembly). We 
    do not write from scratch.

huh?

ES6/emscripten/Typescript was not designed in 2 weeks. could you talk about what you mean.

He's talking about the first JS specification which was done in 2 weeks IIRC. I've seen such comments several times which completely discard all the effort made to improve JS until now.

The first version of the language, upon which all other versions have been based, was done in 2 weeks. There are fundamental shortcomings in JS that exist to this day because of that, and because the web has to remain backwards compatibility. So, despite all the improvements over the year, JS is still poor in some areas, particularly when you're talking about porting applications to JS. It was never designed for that.

He's talking about Javascript itself. The language has a ton of short-comings, hence the rise of languages that transpile to JS. I agree with the previous sentiment, we should replace JS with something better. JS is a nightmare.

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