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Comment by hannofcart | Hacker News Reader

All the excitement around wasm seems quite puzzling to me. Yes, I understand that you can program in whatever language you love but what new language are you hoping would be supported? C? C++? Fortran?

As far as I am concerned, all the languages I care about already have compilers that target JS.

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Rust is the big one for me, personally.

The idea of being to write in one language for embedded software, system software, cli tools, web applications, distributed applications, and now the web client?

That's a very enticing idea. It might finally be the realization of what Java failed to accomplish (technically it did, but never gained a lot of traction on the client b/c it was too slow at the time).

There is a massive performance difference between compiling to js and compiling to wasm.

JS imposes a memory/object model that doesn't map to other languages particularly well, so you either have to play fast and loose with semantics (effectively creating a dialect of the language that you're transpiling), or pay extra overhead for faithfully emulating the original behavior.

WASM is much lower level, and should allow compilers and VMs to use best-fitting data structures and layout.

Another Rustacean checking in. I'd love to write Rust and run it in the browser. Rust uses LLVM so it can use emscripten already, but having closer to native speeds would be great.

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