JavaScript is taking over because that is all they teach now a days at these code bootcamps. Once webassembly gets off the ground javascript will die, but we need to get back to native client software. The web was never meant to handle this.
The browsers are doing a really good job making this a possibility today.
Though, using Waze to find the quickest way to work this morning really make my commute much nicer. There was also a new album I'd been meaning to listen to and streaming it on spotify was nice.
How could it work for them? Most decent sized projects would promptly run out of available memory and have nothing to do about it. And before that they have to deal with the ever longer list of restrictions put on web applications because of the trust model.
Yup. I don't know what to say - I'm impressed by the amount of effort not spent on other things (for your infinite pick of other things).
The future will tell but in the meantime I don't see the problem that was solved by this fix (except for the problem of not running the app in Chrome).
Being partially copied by the same companies that are involved on WebAssembly for their own OSes (MSIL/MDIL, DEX, LLVM bitcode).
So nothing really new there for getting around cross-platform issues.
Hi, what will you do if one nice day Sundarajan Pichai will, for god knows what reason, order web assembly axed out of Chrome and lobby to bury it in W3C?
I've seen this sentiment floated around and it's delusional. "Once [better tech] gets off the ground, [lesser tech with decades of headstart] will die" has never been true on its own grounds.
JS's death will be slow, gradual, and we'll see it coming from two decades away. Just look at Java to see what a popular language on the decline looks like. It's extremely slow, and that's nothing compared to JS.
Not only that but once you develop a native app you must ship a native app. Words cannot describe the pain and suffering that is shipping native code on Windows (installers) or Linux (dependency and distro hell). Mac is better due to uniformity and app bundles but if you want the App Store you have to deal with that bureaucratic nightmare, and you never know if Apple will just arbitrarily destroy your business one day.
The web just works. Things that "just work" always win over superior alternatives that have a higher level of friction. Here's a rule of thumb: every installation step roughly halves adoption. So a 5-step setup or deploy process takes the number of initial impressions and reduces adoption to (I/2^5).
These are all just not accurate. The last is objectively not true in the context you use it (Macs account for a tiny fraction of all desktop and laptop computers in use, the vast majority of which run Windows or Linux in the case of servers).
There are a number of web "applications" which only work on one or a small number of browsers, which have complete features on just one browser (e.g. Slack and calls, which work on Chrome, not Firefox on Mac), and many if not most such "applications" have a lot of very complicated, poorly conceived JavaScript code backing them.
A superior native app requires a download and an install. That's 2-3 more steps. In a corporate environment that may require an IT support ticket and an argument with a sighing grumbling IT person about supporting "more software" that will "break your machine" and "has it been scanned for malware?"
I know that I am very picky about what I install on my computer. That's because I need my computer to work and I've had broken apps and junky installers wreck machines or introduce instability. Even if they don't wreck machines they leave clutter everywhere and are sometimes a pain to uninstall. Then there's the security surface area issue.
So there's many reasons users resist native apps: hassle, security, system integrity, etc.
It's a tough problem. Mobile OSes made a serious attempt to solve it and made a lot of headway there, but even that has collapsed. Look at the security/privacy nightmare that is mobile today. I am now very resistant to installing mobile apps because I assume they'll be reporting my location to advertisers, sucking down all my contacts, etc., so I only install them if I really need them. I prefer the web for most things because the web is a VM that strongly limits access and when I close the browser the app is gone.
I believe this is the main reason Autodesk is doing this.
When I encounter such things I toss them in the trash... not because I can't figure them out but because I no longer have any patience for it. If you can't be bothered to make your software installable / on-ramp-able then I can't be bothered to use it.
I also see it as indicative of how the whole experience is going to go. If installing a development stack is painful then debugging, shipping, upgrading, etc. are also going to be painful.