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Comment by jenscow | Hacker News Reader

A viable replacement.

There will probably always be a snarky, jejune dismissal in every JavaScript thread, but commenters should think to themselves, “It doesn't have to be me.”

I had that thought, but I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to hold JavaScript as a lost cause. Enough large projects are just using JavaScript as a sort of bytecode for the web anyway.

I also find personally that recognising something as bad is the first step to making something better.

That's fine, but we're here to gratify our intellectual curiosity. There's nothing wrong with recognizing as such, it just needs to be done thoughtfully and informatively so we can have a discussion about it.

Recognizing something doesn't imply bringing it up constantly.

Yes, I was being snarky - however, it is a valid concern. There needs to be a choice.

(I write javascript almost every day)

Given that there's a WASM backend to LLVM, once WASM can be used without the need to interface with JS then any language with a WASM frontend (there'll probably be the need for some basic library support) will become a viable replacement.

At the moment however (I believe that it's still the case), WASM still needs to interact with the DOM via JS, so there's a minimum amount of JS boilerplate required for bootstrapping.

An interesting thought for the future is if wasm will make other languages viable on the web. It would be interesting to see if anything else picks up steam as a serious competitor to JavaScript.

The advantage of straight JS is that you don't have to compile it. Once you accept a compilation step you have quite a few pretty good alternatives like TypeScript.

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