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Comment by metmac | Hacker News Reader

I’ll never forget watching Gary Bernhardt give his talk on JavaScript.[0] Was my introduction to asm.js, and the rabbithole associated with compiling code to run in the browser.

12 years on, it’s shocking how much of his fiction became reality.

[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

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The bit about "thick apps" always stuck with me. Partly because the name is funny, partly because it hit close to home. The first time I saw his talk, I was an intern working for a company that had built an entire compiler, IDE, and debugger in-house for their little industrial IO boxes. The compiler was written in C, and we used Emscripten to turn it into some JS that then got "compiled" (see: concatenated) into a giant HTML file with the IDE and debugger bits. Code uploads and debugging happened over ethernet, so all of that just got shoved through Ajax.

This sounds cursed, but customers loved it. Since it wasn't an EXE, it didn't get caught up in their employers' overzealous corporate IT filters. That's why we never switched to Electron. In a sense, we had some of the primeval elements of the thick app.

And if not for the rise of AI it's possible that WASM as a machine-level compilation target for all languages might have happened. As much as Gary predicted he didn't see AI coming.

wait how did AI impede wasm?

I believe the idea is that you don't care what language is being used if you aren't going to look at it anyway. Given that premise, the AI can write JavaScript instead of something you need to compile separately.

WASM is hard enough to use that I would say the number of people using it just because they don't like JS/TS is fairly small.

At least that's always been my impression. If you're willing to go through the effort to use it, it's probably because you need the performance gains, and AI hasn't changed that.

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