Gary Bernhardt presents a thought-provoking history of JavaScript as seen from 2035.
His arguments are that
- With asm.js JavaScript VMs ran code with 50% of native speed (even in 2013)
- Anything that can be compiled can be compiled into asm.js
- Asm.js has basically become the universal runtime
So by further moving the JavaScript VM into the kernel we save ourselves the overhead of hardware process isolation as the VM does this any way.
All this lead to interesting consequences
- Nobody uses binaries any more, everything is asm.js
- The windowing systems of old have been ported to the DOM
- Deployments are as simple as a push
- JavaScript (as a language) is effectively dead
- Overall developer happiness has increased
:’D