People don't learn. The web dev community have just managed to force browsermakers to unify web development on browser side JS, and throw Java applets, activex, and action script to the bucket, just to have a kind of JVM being made a part of the web standard, and forced upon us yet again.
The core problem with Java applets was that they were Java applets
An option to keep the source of the web app closed will fragment the web dev community yet again.
With all the bundlers and minifiers manglers etc, delivered js is already as closed as a wasm binary would be.
Meaningless hyperbole - there are plenty. You're posting on one right now.
Hacker News and at least every Wordpress site. So that covers a significant portion of the existing web.
But this changes nothing. It was always possible to obfuscate JavaScript, just like every other programming language.
Do you? The comparison with Java has been made before, including on HN.
"While Java and Flash [2] came early to the Web and offered managed runtime plugins, neither supported highperformance low-level code, and today usage is declining due to security and performance issues. We discuss the differences between the JVM and WebAssembly in Section 8. "
https://github.com/WebAssembly/spec/blob/master/papers/pldi2...