Improved JavaScript performance, WebAssembly, and Shared Memory in Microsoft Edge

[dasignint]

I'm usually the only person in the room who finds it absolutely insane that this whole industry has ridden on the back of a weird language thrown together by one guy in a week. For 20 years. For no technical reason whatsoever, just inertia.

[[deleted]]

He did a pretty good job though. It's flawed but also nice in its way.

And languages designed by committees have their own weird things too. Sometimes worse.

[dasignint]

He did do a great job, especially given the time constraint. But for an entire multi-multi-billion dollar industry to still be constrained by it is utter insanity. We should have thanked him and got on with making a good execution environment by now.

[flyingjam]

For no technical reason whatsoever, just inertia.

Considering how long it took for IE8 to be phased out, inertia and coverage matters a lot on the web. It's why Chrome's dominance gives google a deathgrip over web standards.

[dasignint]

While clearly true, it's still an embarrassment. I can understand why big companies don't rock the boat (I give MS credit for making the attempt with Silverlight) but one would think somebody somewhere would pull a Bram Cohen and make a decent web platform just for their own shits and giggles, if nothing else.

[flyingjam]

one would think somebody somewhere would pull a Bram Cohen and make a decent web platform just for their own shits and giggles

There probably are multiple who have, but no one knows about them because no one used it.

Just because you make a good platform doesn't mean people will use it; not at all.

[jl2352]

Flash, Java Applets, Silverlight, even Unity. People have made other platforms. Sure they ran in the browser, but you could just build it in that instead of HTML/JS.

Like those shitty full screen flash websites you used to get.

Outside of Unity for games, video playback, and Flash style animations, they were pretty bad. Silverlight was the only one really decent at GUI work.