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Comment by syg | Hacker News Reader

This is important, as there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in this thread.

What's proposed is structural compression of JS with JS-specific bits to speed things up even more. What's proposed is not compiled JS, in that the original JS is not meaningfully transformed at all. There is a very explicit design goal to retain the original syntactic structure.

OTOH WebAssembly is like a new low-level ISA accessible from web browsers. To use wasm, one does have to compile to it. As the parent here says, compiling JS -> wasm currently requires at least a GC but also much more. To engineer a performant VM and runtime for a dynamic programming language like JS is a time-consuming thing. It is curious to see so many folks think that JS can straightforwardly be compiled to wasm. Currently wasm and JS serve very different needs; and I also don't think JS will be going anywhere for many, many years.

Edit: formatting

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This is a very good point. I would also add that there are a lot of languages compiling to JavaScript that would similarly not benefit from wasm. Right now, pretty much all GC-ed languages compiling to JS (such as ClosureScript, Elm, Scala.js, BuckleScript, PureScript, etc.) are in that category. Even if/when wasm supports GC in the future, I expect that dynamically typed languages compiling to JS will still be a long way from benefiting from wasm.

However, all these languages can benefit from the Binary AST right away. Just like any codebase directly written in JavaScript. If the Binary AST has some decent story about position mapping (see [1] which I just filed), they might even get somewhat better tooling/debugging support going through the Binary AST than going through .js source files, out of the box.

[1] https://github.com/syg/ecmascript-binary-ast/issues/17

For context: position mapping is somewhere on our radar, but we haven't reached a stage at which it would make sense to start working on it yet.

If you have ideas and/or spare cycles, of course, they are welcome :)

As a side-note: I believe that we could build upon the (very early) proposed mechanism for comments to also store positions. Size-optimized BinAST files would drop both comments and positions, while debugging-optimized BinAST files would keep both at the end of the file so as to not slow down parsing until they are needed.

That seems awesome. I'm glad that it's on your radar.

If you can point me to the best place to suggest ideas or spend my spare cycles, I would gladly do so. At the very least, I can comment on how we serialize positions in the (tree-based) Scala.js IR, which is size-optimized.

The tracker on which you're posting is a good place, thanks a lot :)

Off-topic: I'm sorry to go a little squishy, but I thought I should say that I appreciate the work both of you do very much... though sjrd's work is a little bit more "direct-impact-for-me" at the moment, I must admit. :p

Of course, as you just both said, your work is kind of complementary... which is always nice. :)

Anyway, thanks for the long-term thinking to the both of you.

thanks :)

A lot of the languages you mentioned have different enough memory allocation characteristics than JavaScript due to immutability and functional style that they would probably benefit from having a garbage collector tuned to their purposes in webassembly. There's a reason we don't have one common garbage collector for all the managed languages.

I do recognize that this is a side point, but I think it's worth mentioning.

A lot of the mentioned languages also allow deep interoperability between their heap and the JavaScript heap, e.g., circular references between objects of the "two heaps", and free access to fields and methods of objects of the other language.

That's very hard (if not impossible) to achieve without leak and performance degradation if the two languages have their own GC, with their own heaps.

Compiling a language to JS is not about making it work. That's easy (it becomes hard to cite a language that does not do it). It's about designing the language to interoperate with JS, and making that work. That is the real challenge.

> Compiling a language to JS is not about making it work. That's easy (it becomes hard to cite a language that does not do it). It's about designing the language to interoperate with JS, and making that work. That is the real challenge.

It's very interesting that Scala and Scala.js have such a relatively painless interaction, but in general I'd say interoperation is "technically" simple by just employing an FFI?

Obviously, words like "seamless" and "effortless" start to enter the vocabulary here, but I'm not entirely these targets are worth it. Are they, do you think?

(I mean, obviously, Scala.js must have seamless 'interop' to Scala, but is 'seamless' introp with JS worth it, or should you require explicit FFI? I'm not sure, but I think you ultimately chose FFI-via-annotations, but there's a lot of fuzziness wrt. js.Dynamic.)

Don't you think that someone is eventually going to compile a JVM to wasm which would allow languages that compile to JVM bytecode to run directly as standard JVM bytecode in the browser? Wouldn't that allow to have as good performance as JS compilation? (I am asking you as it looks like you might have some expertise on languages that compile to both JVM and JS ;))

It might allow you to have as good performance as JS compilation, but definitely not as good interoperability with JS. Some of those languages, like ClojureScript, Scala.js and BuckleScript, have complete 2-way interop between them and JS, including for mutable objects, their properties and their methods.

"Just" compiling Scala to JVM-on-wasm does not give you the real power of Scala.js, which is its interoperability with JavaScript libraries. Similarly, just compiling Clojure to JVM-on-wasm does not give you the real power of ClojureScript.

People often forget about the interop with JS part--which is immensely more important than raw performance--if they don't actually work with a language that offers it. :-(

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