As pointed out by an intrepid Coder Radio listener, I totally missed the importance of Web Assembly when it was in its initial nascent phases a year or so go. Now that Web Assembly is going to become a standard endorsed by the W3C and has backing from at least two major browser vendors to date (Google and Mozilla), I’ve done a full 180 and am convinced it is the future of not only web development but probably a good deal of mobile and desktop development as well; my assumption is that tools like Ionic and Electron will be able to leverage the performance gains brought by web assembly as well.
Looking back my mistake was that I failed to parse out the signal from the noise in the wider JavaScript conversation circa 2014 and on. There was (and in many communities still is) a lot of angst about the short-comings in the JavaScript language and a lot of people making noise about using alternatives to it that would simply compile to it – CoffeeScript and TypeScript for example. There was of course a thread in the background about Web Assembly becoming potentially a language agnostic solution to this problem, but because I was looking at it through the lens of alternative languages to JavaScript and at the time didn’t think and I still don’t think that changing from JavaScript just because you want a different language but then compiling into JavaScript makes any sense at all. In other words, I took a breathe and shouted a hearty “get off my lawn!”
My curmudgeon-like tendencies aside, I still firmly standby the idea that just writing in something like CoffeeScript to compile into JavaScript just because you don’t some features or shortcomings of JavaScript is silly. What I missed was that this whole language brouhaha was just a minor prologue to the real story — Web Assembly. Moving to Web Assembly not only increases web application performance significantly but also (as more languages create compilers for it) gives those developers who prefer some language over JavaScript a much more reasonable choice; they can simply use the language of their choice and compile it directly to Web Assembly! I’m totally on-board with that. In fact, I’ve been working in Microsoft’s TypeScript and find it great, so if we actually make it (we probably will) to this Web Assembly world, then I’ll probably go Typ eScript for most greenfield projects going forward.
As in Eden, there’s a potential snake in our garden — Apple. Web Assembly being fully supported on mobile Safari for iOS is absolutely necessary to unleash the full potential and development efficiencies that I believe Web Assembly can over the next five year period bring.
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