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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

What's old is new again :)

asm.js came about because it was a very optimizable subset of JavaScript, then it was superseded by WebAssembly, then the proposal in TFA is basically asking for asm.js back, but perhaps the better answer is to make WebAssembly fully support all of what JS could originally do.

This is perhaps why as I get older I sometimes feel like I want to get out of software development and become a goose farmer like that dude on LinkedIn - lots of times feels more like spiraling in circles than actually advancing.

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I think it’s much harder to make big leaps as a community with languages and other - relative to the technology stack as a whole - lower level concerns.

Look at the stronghold grip of C/C++ and how long it’s taken Rust to gain a meaningful foothold in those realms for example.

Google wanted to flat replace JS once already, that was the entire origin of Dart. They only pivoted to the cross platform mobile framework as its primary target after it failed to gain traction as a standard

Actually in regards to Dart it is a more subtle.

Dartium was cancelled and AdWords team, having just migrated from GWT to AngularDart, saved the Dart team.

Eventually many left the team.

Somewhere at Google, Flutter started and when they decided to replace JavaScript on their original design, they decided to reach out to the Dart team.

So Dart got a new purpose in life, being Flutter's language.

In this process it was rebooted from dynamic language, into a static type one, having JIT and AOT toolchains.

How long Flutter, and by association Dart, remain relevant remains to be seen.

Dart is a better designed language in many regards.

It’s not just better than JavaScript, I would argue it’s probably the best general purpose modern OOP based language out there right now.

It was actually really fortunate in that for a long time it didn’t have a big community behind it and they just put a lot of very smart language designers on the team where they had ten years to try various approaches and learn from the mistakes of not only themselves but others without a lot of outside noise.

But there’s no other language I would prefer to write applications in. It’s just a really nice mix of ergonomic, expressive and powerful.

asm.js came about because Mozzilla refused to adopt PNaCL, which is kind of ironic given the existing Firefox market share a decade later.

PNaCL was essentially "let's shove LLVM into every browser and make it a mandatory part of the web", which somehow seems even worse than "let's shove the JVM into every browser and make it a mandatory part of web"

Given Google's power a decade later, with Safari left as the only non-Chrome clone with market relevance, it hardly makes a difference.

Additionally we already have LLVM all over the place, alongside JVM and CLR, it is the most deployed compiler infrastructure with contributions at the same level as the Linux kernel.

>"let's shove the JVM into every browser and make it a mandatory part of web"

Javagator / Jazilla!

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/javagator-down-not-o...

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