Marco Alka

Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor

Jul 30, 2018

First of all, JS is not the hottest language of the web, it is the only language of the web. This fact will never change, and WASM is just another addition to it. In order to trigger WASM, you need JS. In order to interact with Web APIs, you need JS. WASM is code written in another language, compiled to an AST (don't worry what that is, it's just a code representation) and running on a low level in the JSVM (JavaScript Virtual Machine). WASM cannot replace JS, at least yet. And that will remain true for quite a while. As a result, if you want to do web-dev, JS should be the first language you learn and at which you excel.

Well, that's true at least in terms of what runs inside a browser. If you want to add animations or logic, JS will do the job. However, many people don't like JS for different reasons, so there are projects in order to use other languages, which compensate for JS's flaws, and then transpile (read: convert) the programs into JS code. One of the most prominent languages is TypeScript, which is a superset of JS and adds things, like typing and interfaces. Once you are confident with JS, I recommend taking a look at such a language in order to at least understand in what way JS is lacking and what some companies might require of you if you want to create web applications for them.

If you are truly interested in WASM and find an application for it in one of your projects, though, I recommend taking a look at the Rust language, which by now has an official WASM compiler target. It is a language which allows you to make many guarantees about compiled code and promotes very modern programming paradigms. It has a steep learning curve, but is all the more rewarding afterwards for any code you write.

Agnishom Chattopadhyay

Functional Programming Enthusiast

Jul 31, 2018

This fact will never change

What makes you so sure?

Agnishom Chattopadhyay

While "never" is a word, which surely can never be used literally, I am quite certain that no one here will see a world without JS in their lifetime, which might as well mean "never" for us.

Other than that, the fact that Microsoft (see JScript) and Google (see Dart), the companies with the absolutely greatest browser market share, tried several times in the past to change the language of the web and failed tells me, that it is an endeavour difficult enough to talk about it like a fact. The only thing which happened is that Ecma International adapted modern features into ECMA-262 - which resulted most notably in the changes brought about by ES6.

Think about it. That very thing happened with WASM as well! Mozilla wanted to introduce a very efficient, low-level JS subset to the world, later known as asm.js. They praised it as the future of web computing. Soon after, talks about standardization began, and now we have WASM, a low-level addition to JS. And that's not the first time ideas got assimilated.

That's why I think rather than everyone in the whole world having to somehow manage

two scripting engines
backward compatibility for both
interoperability of both systems
at the cost of a simple engine, memory overhead and performance
which every browser in existance would have to introduce

JS will be adapted to modern needs. I'd even go a step further and say that the holy trinity, which is HTML, CSS and JS, will always be the foundation of web sites. They will just be adapted.

The only thing which might happen is that people completely stop using JS once WASM can be used without JS. But even then, there are so many websites which completely depend on JS, that it will still be centuries until it can be removed from major browsers.

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