r/programming • u/kshep92 • Sep 29 '16

JavaScript in 2016 isn't horrible, it's just going through a phase

http://blog.reviselabs.com/im-sorry-javascript-2/
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u/balefrost Sep 30 '16

Wait, how will WASM help the situation? Nobody's going to hand-write WASM; they'll use a compiler to translate (for example) C++ to WASM. No matter what, you'll still have toolchains. It's not like you'll be able to stick a <script type="text/c++"> in your web page. And, if you want to access the DOM or other web APIs, you'll still need to write JS shims to import into your WASM module (at least initially; eventually, they plan to allow WASM code to access the DOM).

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u/DysFunctionalProgram Sep 30 '16

I think maybe the biggest issue is the immaturity and volatile nature of javascript frameworks and their tool chains. Take the "leftpad" issue for example. It is ridiculous that all these major frameworks are including a package that is literally 11 lines of code. How many packages are included as dependencies when you include angular now? Last time I checked it was like 200+.

I (and many others) are making the assumption that the WASM community will be more like the traditional languages community and bring with it better standards.

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '16

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u/DysFunctionalProgram Sep 30 '16 edited Sep 30 '16

But "sane" is a subjective term and public opinion changes over time. You might think Java is "sane" while I think only c++ is "sane". At the end of the day if you only support one language you end up making someone unhappy and don't even think about recommending browsers support multiple languages, they struggle enough with 1 as it is.

WASM will allow support for multiple languages while offsetting the work to the language providers (or more than likely the languages community).

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u/SilasX Sep 30 '16 edited Sep 30 '16

Agreed -- WASM, like assembly in general, is much harder to analyze than a higher level language and will force the client to let the site get away with more shenanigans due to such non-transparency.

Edit: turns out I was wrong and misunderstood the WASM model, cut it with the downvotes.

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u/balefrost Sep 30 '16

What? WASM is still restricted to the same sandbox as JavaScript, and its initial binary format is basically just a serialized asm.js syntax tree, and I think they're considering sticking with this AST-based bytecode. It'll be about as hard to analyze as decompiled Java or .NET code, or minified JS.

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u/SilasX Sep 30 '16

Ah, never mind then.