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What's stopping WebAssembly from effectively replacing JavaScript?
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But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
You've gotten several other answers that are true and correct - the pain of implementation at this point is greater than the pain points that WASM solves. But this is also a non trivial one - most of what Javascript should be doing on a webpage is DOM manipulation.
At some point, WASM will either come out with a killer feature/killer app/use case that Javascript (and all the libraries/frameworks out there) hasn't figured out how to handle, and it will establish a niche (besides "Javascript is sort of a dumb language let's get rid of it"), and depending on the use case, you might see some of the 17.4 million (estimated) Javascript developers chuck it for....what? Rust? Kotlin? C? C#? But the switching costs are non-trivial - and frankly, especially if you still have to write Javascript in order to manipulate the DOM....well, what are we solving for?
If you're writing a web app where one of the WASM languages gives you a real competitive advantage, I'd say that's your use case right there. But since most web applications are basically strings of api calls looped together to dump data from the backend into a browser, it's hard to picture wider adoption. I've been wrong before, though.
Even if WASM gets some amazing feature, like super-fast DOM manipulation, it would still be used via API from JavaScript. WASM is a subset of JavaScript that mainly consists of low level operations. It's not exactly nice for writing code. It's like assembler in this respect — very fast, very efficient, but we still tend to prefer a higher level language.
How is WebAssembly a subset of JavaScript? Aren't you confusing it with asm.js?
He meant it as "wasm will be invoked by javascript" and not the other way around.