Hacker News Reader

> Browsers will catch up with what developers want.

Developers want everything from JavaScript to C++, Python and Haskell. There's no way a browser can specifically address all what developers want. Therefore browsers should become better virtual machines.

Edit: yup, WASM is a good start.

View on HN

Sounds like you need to read up just a little bit on Web Assembly which is compiled from anything including C, C++, Rust and just about any language. Including Python and others. Web Assembly will make syntax irrelevant for web scripting and JavaScript entirely optional depending on how much WebASM is allowed to access.

As soon as Webassembly ships garbage collection and the authors are willed to create a Wasm backend for the given language.

The hope is that one day it will be possible to implement an efficient concurrent GC in WASM. However, right now it still lacks the primitives (e.g. locking primitives, shared memory, and memory barrier instructions).

>Web Assembly will make syntax irrelevant for web scripting and JavaScript entirely optional

That's what many think, but that's not what WASM is for though. It's still a foreign world to the DOM, and not a first class citizen like JS.

It's more about driving canvas games or offloading some expensive computations than actually writing your app in WASM as opposed to JS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com