Hacker News Reader

Comment by winterlight | Hacker News Reader

Modern web development is already hard by itself, specially when it comes to security. A saner runtime language is needed to replace the sub par standard that is javascript. One with a robust type-system and coherent semantics. It won't fix every problem, but a least it would prevent abuses such as the one in question.

View on HN

WASM (WebAssembly) is about developing a very simple cross-browser bytecode that allows implementing any runtime on top of it. The first versions are already rolling out in latest major browser versions, but at this stage you don't yet get DOM access from WASM. After the initial phase when DOM access is implemented, it's the beginning of end for JavaScript. Future browsers might well implement JS as a pre-shipped runtime targeting the internal WASM core.

Web Assembly is specifically designed not to replace JavaScript [0].

[0]: http://webassembly.org/docs/faq/#is-webassembly-trying-to-re...

I was commenting to the GP about technologies to replace JavaScript. On the long term WASM is the best candidate, though it's indeed not one of the intended goals of the project. JS will be with us eternally, rest assured. But if DOM-enabled WASM would one day gain wide adoption, developers targeting contemporary browsers of the future would at least have a wider selection of runtimes to choose form in addition to JS.

On the other hand, if you thought modern browsers are bloated, just wait for everyone to compile their runtimes on top of WASM.

It's not very hard to imagine, especially in an enteprise environment, running a browser 15-20 years from now and that browser loading the equivalent of the JVM, .NET CLR, Ruby VM, etc., on top of WASM :)

15-20 years from now, it's likely that "browser" will just be the operating system.

This actually reminds me of "es-operating-system"; an experimental operating system copyrighted by Nintendo (yes, Nintendo!), where "every system API is defined in Web IDL".

AFAIK it never went anywhere, but maybe building an entirely new OS/Browser based around WebIDL seemed less insane 10 years ago.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/es-operating-system/

We'll all have gigabit connections by then. So even though it'll be 100 mb of bloat, it will still load the same as today ;)

Yes but they'll be pwned by the FCC (and friends). Don't count on it.

I can also see it happen that browsers will one day shut down plain JavaScript, only allowing WASM. Certainly if the security burden becomes too big.

That's awfully optimistic of you.

First of all browsers are committed to backwards compatibility.

Secondly, there's huge amounts of Javascript written right now, nobody's going to throw away billions of dollars worth of investments. People complain about Cobol written in the 60's, when the programmers counted in the thousands. Javacript today is written by millions of programmers.

And thirdly, Javascript evolves, as do browsers.

I can certainly see a world where WASM and JS execution pipelines in browsers converge -- where the form used for executing WASM and JS is the same.

Once WASM becomes established, I would expect JS to become "yet another runtime" on it.

That's what they have to tell to placate JS apologists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com