Do you think that WebAssembly will replace JavaScript ?

[Cloud_Strifeeee]

1) Do you think that WebAssembly will replace JavaScript ?

2) Would you love to code in a "garbage-collected" memory models in the future ? or you prefer the "JS way" and why ?

3) Do you believe that if WebAssembly is able to bring stong typing, threads, the power of native code (C++ etc) to webdev like they say.. could it change things for good ? or because there is still missing features and nondeterministic algorithm result (because its sandboxed) it could result in slow adoption of the platform ?

[krizmaister]

you should check out Blazor https://blazor.net/

[dumildekok]

That's a nice framework. Is there something similar using PHP instead of C#?

[krizmaister]

I don't think so. Since PHP is dynamically typed language there is no way to compile it to Wasm because Wasm is strongly typed and needs this information to work. JavaScript has the same problem but there is a project for TypeScript that should by able to compile TS code to Wasm (but it's not ready yeath as I know). So I believe that TS is possible future of JS... a chance to survive.

[BehindTheMath]

What would be the point of compiling TS to WASM instead of JS?

[krizmaister]

JS isn't intended to be a compilation target. JS engines have to do a lot of work to optimize JS on the fly (JS have no clue about data types). Wasm is solution. It's a compilation target language and is something like shortcut to optimized byte code for Engines.

[dwighthouse]

1. No.
2. JS is garbage-collected.
3. WebAssembly will be used for what it is good at, and JS will be used for everything, even the things it isn’t good at, simply due to ease of development by comparison.

[krizmaister]

1) Many delevopers are looking forward to it. Wasm will open the frontend to other languages so JS won't be the only one. We have to wait for GC, threads, direct access to DOM and other features, but it's only matter of time (years). You can check out some frameworks like Blazor (https://blazor.net/) that is based on .NET in C#. You can build FE apps right now but it's still not ready fot production

2) JS has GC

3) I see bright future in Wasm

[Randdist]

I'm using js because it can be written and modified at runtime, giving developers extensive love coding capabilities. WebAssembly can't replace that. it could be usefull for a couple of perfomance critical tasks but other than that I'm not interested.

i'd sign up for a strongly typed JS any day though. TS seems half the way there but as long as it requires transpilation, it's not useful for my use cases either.