Were just waiting on WASM to be able to access the DOM APIs directly, and then all languages will be first class citizens on the web, and then RIP JavaScript.
Is that even a stated goal? I swear we’ve been waiting for that to exist for the better part of a decade. It would solve so many issues and comes up in every discussion about Javascript, yet the powers that be seem to have zero interest in pushing this forward.
I don’t think so - Javascript doesn’t have to ship its language runtime so it will always have a size advantage.
You don’t need a language runtime if your program has no runtime, right? A rust or C program is just the program, no runtime.
Well they still have runtimes, but yes they can be pretty minimal.
You’re still shipping a load of libraries that come for free with JS though, e.g. with Rust WASM string formatting and unicode support always ends up being annoyingly huge, and that’s built in to JS engines. There’s also collections (
Map,Set), etc.
That would be quite an amazing era to live in ahaha ! We can the start the work as a community to match the JavaScript Ecosystem by providing high quality primitives for developers. For that to happen developer UX has to improve though :) but I think WASM definitely has some future.
However to contrast my previous thoughts, I find it pretty sad that people want to move away from JS when we got thing like Bun & Demo 2.0 hitting their prime!
We got benchmarks, cross-runtime stdlib, better registeries, type safety, enough performance, extendability (with runtime plugins & API). I think were approchaing a TS/JS paradigm that’s pretty impressive I must admit.
Deno looks interesting.
But Bun choosing Zig makes me think their priorities are not my priorities. As of now, you choose Zig (a not-yet-stable language) because you want to learn Zig and make a neat side-project. Those are not my priorities. Zig offers no unique advantages other than neat new syntax.
Deno chose Rust, which, like Zig, is new, but Rust has reached 1.0 and offers a unique advantage with its safety features. I’m not saying anything about the greatness of Rust here, only that Rust does offer unique advantages, and Rust could be chosen because of general priorities.
Bun chose Zig and then worked backwards and formed their priorities around Zig. Deno formed their priorities and their priorities lead them to Rust.
That’s how I feel anyway.
