Hacker News Reader

Comment by kabacha | Hacker News Reader

Why? webassembly is there to escape from the godawful syntax and design of javascript...

Where did you get that idea? It's not a design goal of WebAssembly: https://webassembly.org/

WebAssembly's goal is to provide a simple VM with performance good enough for the web to compete with native programs and to unlock use cases that are not possible to run efficiently in JavaScript.

The syntax that the developer see is totally irrelevant here.

He not only mentioned syntax but design too. Clearly JavaScript's lack of int (for example, to mention a design decision of JS) is one of the reasons of its poor performance, not to mention its weak typing approach.

There is no lack of int in Walt.

So it's not really JavaScript??? lol

Exactly.

Programming languages are tools, not religions. If a project like this can help people use and understand their tools that is a good thing. Reacting as if the infidel language is defiling the sacred is absurd and indefensible from a practical standpoint.

Well yes... unless you realize that ours is a fashion-driven industry, where technical choices are not made based on technical merits but via a popularity contest. From a practical standpoint, complaining about propagation of bad choices is absolutely defensible.

Or, to put in another way: today you don't complain about crap tech pushing out good tech, tomorrow half of the jobs in your field require you work with the crap tech.

While I have similar feelings, I also think the mark of success for WebAssembly will be if it succeeds in freeing developers to do web stuff in the language of their choice.

Even if that choice is a familiar JavaScript-like language, it still proves the point that the web is now open to whatever the developer wants. So in that sense, I applaud and welcome things like this.

Please do port all of most-hated languages to run with WebAssembly and create new ones that I also don't like. It more or less means that languages I love can be ported and that new ones I will love can be created.

Thanks, I thought nobody would say this...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com