Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

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OK, yeah the "metal" part is fair. He showed asm.js and then posited that there would be something called "metal" that causes JavaScript to die and enables application written in more languages. And major apps could be ported to it.

Originally my conception of the video was more like this commenter below: It’s been a while since I’ve watched the video but its more about JavaScript becoming the universal assembly language.

I guess a lot of people are saying "he predicted this" without referring what specifically he is predicting.

FWIW it's not clear to me that WASM is going to do that. Everything I've heard from the team says that WASM and JS are complementary. Not that WASM will cause JavaScript to die.

I think there's some possibility of that happening in the distant future, but it's far from obvious. I think JS VMs will always be better at running JS than WASM VMs running JS engines, and all the JS out there will exist for a long time.

Also, JS is at a pretty good level of abstraction to manipulate the DOM, whereas C, C++ and Rust aren't. And it has some good syntactic shortcuts. Despite being a Python person, I would probably even argue that JS is better to manipulate the DOM, despite JS and Python being very similar otherwise. Function literals might be one reason.

So when people say "he predicted this", it would be nice to be specific about what the prediction was. WASM is a step in that direction but I would argue it's also fairly clear given that asm.js existed and he showed it. The real question is if WASM can handle all these use cases. Working on a language has made me appreciate many reasons that it's hard to make a polyglot VM. Tiny changes can bias your VM towards one compilation source vs. another.

> Also, JS is at a pretty good level of abstraction to manipulate the DOM

I agree with your point in general, but surely the fact that there are 10 million js frameworks invented every week is proof that the native DOM APIs are not a good abstraction? As a mostly front end dev, most of my UI logic these days target _React_, not the dom APIs. To the extent that I write JavaScript, it’s pure data manipulation, which can be written in any language.

That's true, although for another example, React is also commonly used with JSX to express DOM fragments. And JS has that syntax but Python, C, Rust, etc. don't.

In other words, the particulars of the language matters. I wouldn't underestimate 20+ years of JS evolution toward expressing the problem better.

I'm working on my own language and all those details are hard. When they work, they're invisible to users. You only notice when it's not there or doesn't work! I would agree that Python is a better language than JS in most respects, but it's not clear to me that it's a better language for writing web front ends.

e.g. the async abstractions and promises are different and I believe that matters.

The video creator is on HN so if the gods of internet attention shine upon us he may be able to comment here.

In lieu of that, I'll offer my one-line take of the prediction of the video. JavaScript will fade from popularity, but its (original) popularity will inspire a low-level assembly-like language (looking more and more like WebAssembly these days) that will provide a new substrate for most application development, web-based or otherwise, replacing traditional binaries.

As you point out it's not at all clear, even five years on from this talk, that this prediction will be correct. WebAssembly is currently complementary to JS and cannot fully replace it. The vast majority of websites these days use JS but not WebAssembly. Use of WebAssembly for applications that traditionally have not been run inside a web browser (e.g. GIMP, LibreOffice, etc.) is still nascent and it's nowhere near a sure bet that it'll take off there.

But maybe, just maybe, it'll happen.

The sheer number of big corporate backers, and standardization, is what will make it happen. That's really what is different here versus Java applets, Silverlight, NaCl etc. Those all failed because nobody was big enough to single-handedly push something like that onto the ecosystem. Now that they're acting in concert, things are very different.

Everything else is "just engineering". E.g. as far as being complementary to JS, and not being able to replace it - they are already working on access to DOM.

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