The problem is Wasm is not improving nearly as fast as predicted here. We don't have DOM manipulation so we will still need JS regardless as glue code, or just eschew HTML and CSS altogether and render everything on a canvas as Flutter and some Rust GUIs do but that's a shame to lose the feature set of the web.
DavidPiper 2 hours ago [-]
I love(?) that he absolutely predicted a global disaster between 2020-2025, he just got the wrong type. Which is very JavaScript.
noman-land 48 minutes ago [-]
He was pretty close to being NaN% correct.
jdw64 2 hours ago [-]
JS became a compilation target (and it really did), and back then in the video it was asm.js (that's been deprecated, hasn't it?), but then WebAssembly came along... Seeing it actually being implemented and running natively, it seems his prediction was accurate. I mainly use TypeScript myself, and now with Electron, web technologies are wrapped into desktop apps, so web syntax has even entered computer programs. People say Electron is heavy and not great, but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once. Sometimes insights like that are surprising.
The 'death' being discussed here means that JavaScript becomes the substrate, a state where you don't use it directly, but it's everywhere. And that has truly come to pass.
satvikpendem 10 minutes ago [-]
As someone else said, Flutter is good, but also look into Rust based GUI development. With frameworks like GPUI or Slint or egui, they are optimized for cross-platform desktop use cases specifically and are significantly faster and more lightweight than Electron and these days do also support macOS, Windows, and Linux out of the box.
frail_figure 2 hours ago [-]
> but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once.
Flutter exists too, and supports iOS and Android in addition to the desktop OSes. The dev time is pretty fast too imo.
That said, idk how the performance compares to Electron or Native apps.
As a small team, optimizing for "actually getting the thing shipped" is so much better than optimizing for speed anyway.
satvikpendem 11 minutes ago [-]
Flutter is great, still the fastest way to make cross platform mobile apps and you get desktop and web support essentially for free.
Performance is very fast as it's all natively AOT compiled machine code without any web views like Electron.
derfurth 1 hours ago [-]
In my experience performance is about the same as native on mobile. On desktop I cannot compare as I thankfully never had to make cross platform desktop apps using native platform SDKs, but Flutter is doing fine. I am a working on a non trivial desktop app, and I am pretty happy about it.
Hopefully the desktop story is going improve as Canonical is now leading the Flutter desktop side.
vips7L 20 minutes ago [-]
Darts an amazing language too.
wiseowise 1 hours ago [-]
> Flutter exists too, and supports iOS and Android in addition to the desktop OSes. The dev time is pretty fast too imo.
Flutter is a joke on the web, and it consumes as much as Electron, sometimes worse, on a desktop.
satvikpendem 13 minutes ago [-]
Where does it consume more than Electron?
ifh-hn 1 hours ago [-]
You got sources to back this up, or is this just you're opinion?
moritzwarhier 1 hours ago [-]
Regarding the "joke on the web", there's plenty of HN threads about Flutter where you will see this sentiment, not only about performance, also about UX (e.g. text rendering, selection, scrolling...).
I'm not sure if the web render engine has gotten better since then, and am too lazy to look up the links rn, but threads should be easy to find using HN search.
Still seems like a common source language + GUI toolkit that targets the web platform and various native platforms (mainly Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and desktop Linux of course) without significant overhead has not been achieved yet. And it's questionable whether it's possible, given the special requirements (and capabilities) of the web platform and the different native platform.
satvikpendem 13 minutes ago [-]
Dioxus Native supports both web and native platforms because they serve HTML and CSS for the web and then on native they turn that into canvas rendered code just like Flutter, not a webview, because they built their own HTML and CSS renderer.
For Flutter web, yes as it's canvas based it doesn't have all the same web features but generally for crud apps it doesn't much matter, especially if it's near zero effort taking your Flutter mobile and desktop app and putting it on the web. With the new impeller renderer and Wasm improvements it has gotten quite faster too.
_the_inflator 2 hours ago [-]
JavaScript is the new assembler layer so to say. Every compiler as per definition translates human readable code into machine language.
The benefit of JavaScript is, that, after Google really pushed it to its limit with V8 and of course NodeJS made it a backend dream, that it is ubiquitous and once written usable everywhere, much kinda like PDF.
Its versatility gave it the advantage over WebAssembly to this day, because it is not as widespread available as JavaScript.
I agree with you, that JavaScript itself is nowadays tantamount with TypeScript - what a giant leap this has been. Angular (2) was the unsung hero here. Angular was harshly criticized when they went TypeScript right from the beginning while still offering a native JavaScript version as well (which was basically unusable to be honest).
It is funny, that the last hideout not featuring TS as their default option is React, while more and more major integral projects like NextJS rely out of the box on TS. ReactJS will fall, too. It wouldn't be the first time regarding innovations coming from other projects. Again Angular is leading the innovation while ReactJS is a follower.
You rarely can go wrong with JavaScript and Python, I would say.
saghm 1 hours ago [-]
> Every compiler as per definition translates human readable code into machine language.
This is a pedantic point, but that's not really what the definition of compiler is as much as a common understanding of it. By definition, it just translates one language into another, and a human-readable to human-readable translation is still a compiler ("transpiler" is more slang than actual formal terminology).
This might just be one of those already lost battles, but like "crypto" being used to mean "digital money" rather than "cryptography", I feel like the new terminology is weird and unnecessary, so it's something I have trouble adapting to even though I rationally know that usage evolves over time and sometimes the words I like less will become the norm.
cxr 29 minutes ago [-]
It's no use being pedantic if you're not going to be correct.
> This is a pedantic point, but that's not really what the definition of compiler is as much as a common understanding of it. By definition, it just translates one language into another
The history and etymology doesn't support that definition, either; that's just another "common [mis]understanding" of the term. It's in the name. A compiler produces a compilation—an aggregate of multiple subroutines, including user-supplied ones and some by the system/programming environment, transformed into a single program for a given target.
(You're describing the process of "autocoding", a job that every compiler does, and a term that predates "transpiler" but that no one uses because they favor stretching the more frequently encountered term "compiler" for their use case.)
jdw64 2 hours ago [-]
You seem to have said what I was trying to say, but much more eloquently.
I also agree with your opinion on Angular.
But I like React, so I'm a little sad. Still, I mostly agree with you.
The reasons you criticize React are exactly the reasons I love React. Because it changes slowly, even someone like me can keep up. (Just kidding.)
Dwedit 51 minutes ago [-]
Within the video's story, they removed virtual memory and memory protection because the JIT was good enough. Nothing like that has happened at all.
wffurr 4 minutes ago [-]
The WebAssembly component people are pushing Wasm as a replacement for container-based virtualization, so it's not that far off.
jdw64 39 minutes ago [-]
Sometimes I think, I wish I had the knowledge to dig into these kinds of detailed parts like you do. I tend to obsess only over the context of what the video is trying to say, so I miss these small details. You probably achieved that through hard study. I looked it up, and you were definitely right
bee_rider 15 minutes ago [-]
I wonder, has did anyone try a hardware accelerator for web assembly? Cursory googling, I found a research paper, but from 2024, so maybe too recent to be a “real thing.”
Uehreka 35 minutes ago [-]
> The 'death' being discussed here means that JavaScript becomes the substrate, a state where you don't use it directly, but it's everywhere. And that has truly come to pass.
Not sure what timeline you’re living in, but people absolutely still write tons of JS, and WebAssembly has yet to take over as a commonly used runtime for web applications. You can definitely find examples of companies building on it, but don’t mistake that for the kind of sea change Gary was describing here.
iirc, v8 never had any special compilation path for it to begin with.
wffurr 4 minutes ago [-]
V8 also supported AOT for asmjs but it's since been removed as well.
neonstatic 41 minutes ago [-]
> People say Electron is heavy and not great, but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once
I am hesitant to call that "support". If even Meta can't get their Electron application to work reliably, who can? WhatsApp client for macOS is awful and it's getting worse. Discord is awful and it's getting worse. Spotify works better when running through the browser. At this point, when I see that the application is using Electron, I am assuming it's not supported on my OS and I move on.
lelandfe 1 hours ago [-]
> People say Electron is heavy and not great, but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once
Websites have actually long been a great cross-platform mechanism
Just a shame about the giant browser you have to load first
moritzwarhier 57 minutes ago [-]
To be fair, implementing something like the Spotify client does require a web app, not "just" a web site.
But even document rendering with light scripting is not trivial so yeah, the required browser is the bottleneck.
I always wonder (layman question): couldn't native Electron apps (and similar technologies) save a great deal of RAM by using the same sandboxing model for apps that browsers use for tabs, instead of fully-fledged instances?
Was that an idea that Tauri also tries to implement, or am I remembering this wrongly?
ymolodtsov 45 minutes ago [-]
It'd be great if Electron itself became a core part of the OS. Tauri is closer to this on MacOS because it tries to use WebKit but not enough.
eranation 16 minutes ago [-]
Surprised no one mentioned this is the guy who brought us this masterpiece. If you haven’t seen it, drop everything and watch it, best 5 minutes of your day guaranteed.
Every few years, we invent a better JavaScript. Then we transpile it to JavaScript.
jerf 1 hours ago [-]
It's all assembly code in the end. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with compiling down to Javascript, a high-level language can still implement many things that direct Javascript does not. Just about every language guarantee you've ever used can be violated by raw assembler.
notarobot123 2 hours ago [-]
Mass adoption trumps good design every time.
Surac 2 hours ago [-]
My first contact with js was trying to make a button change its color on mouseover. There was no css back then. I bought a book and was so put off from the syntax that i never looked back to js from that day on. Never regretted my decision
satvikpendem 7 minutes ago [-]
I find these sorts of comments quite strange. So one tried something over 30 years ago and was put off by syntax of all things and then decided they'd never look at it again? So weird to base opinions on 30 year old experiences that were not even in-depth experiences but cursory glances.
afavour 42 minutes ago [-]
There are a ton of reasons to object to JS but the syntax? It isn’t even all that unique.
notesinthefield 2 hours ago [-]
I had a similar path and never came back to JS until work forced me to learn. To me, it has only gotten more readable.
julianlam 2 hours ago [-]
s/JS/PHP
comrade1234 2 hours ago [-]
I kind of like real JavaScript with prototype inheritance. It's not how we use it in browsers though.
And now with typescript and running it in the server... I'd rather just use Java.
falcor84 2 hours ago [-]
The syntax? I got 99 problems with js, but syntax ain't one of them. It's just C-style syntax, no?
TheOtherHobbes 20 minutes ago [-]
C syntax was never that great. It's basically mnemonic PDP-11 assembler with a few added data structures.
js is mutant C with dementia - hacked together over over a fortnight, full of inconsistencies and weird corners.
I skim though it and saw they had something javascript asm.js in kernel.
RIshabh235 2 hours ago [-]
We’re past the halfway point of Bernhardt’s 2035 timeline; JavaScript hasn’t died yet, but it’s clearly writing its own eulogy in WebAssembly.
wiseowise 1 hours ago [-]
Multiple generations of your family will be long dead before last JS instruction gets executed. Unless there's going to happen a global thermonuclear war. I still bet on JS surviving over most humans.
jazz9k 2 hours ago [-]
I review many sites/month from different clients. They are all using some form of JavaScript.
It's like PHP, it will never die.
jerf 1 hours ago [-]
"Death" is hard to define for a programming language. It's tempting to say "the last time anyone writes it", or maybe "runs it", but to put that in biological terms that seems like defining "death" for a person as "the last chemical bond that was part of their body is broken"... sure, it'll happen someday, but all the properties we associate with the term "death" happen rather soon than that.
matt_kantor 2 hours ago [-]
> It's like PHP, it will never die.
I predict that PHP will live a long life, but not as long as C, and I predict JavaScript will have a lifespan closer to C's than PHP's.
varun_ch 2 hours ago [-]
It’s also relevant that LLMs have so much JavaScript training data that I don’t see a world where we’re not still using JavaScript.
fishfasell 2 hours ago [-]
The JS death and AI bubble are two events I keep hearing about but will never come.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
The AI bubble is now, maybe you mean the AI bubble pop
lezojeda 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
marking-time 1 hours ago [-]
"YavaScript" made me smile.
2 hours ago [-]
arkadiytehgraet 1 hours ago [-]
Regardless of the content, this is one of my most favourite talks ever, especially in the delivery aspect. It served me as an inspiration for quite some time when I had to present anything to a wide audience.
roshiya 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
naveen99 2 hours ago [-]
interpreted languages carry a lot more context than compiled ones. Sandboxed compiled languages don’t have the context baggage, but come with other parts of the brain dead.
Dwedit 49 minutes ago [-]
I don't think Javascript is still interpreted though?
Rendered at 15:14:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The 'death' being discussed here means that JavaScript becomes the substrate, a state where you don't use it directly, but it's everywhere. And that has truly come to pass.
Flutter exists too, and supports iOS and Android in addition to the desktop OSes. The dev time is pretty fast too imo.
That said, idk how the performance compares to Electron or Native apps.
As a small team, optimizing for "actually getting the thing shipped" is so much better than optimizing for speed anyway.
Performance is very fast as it's all natively AOT compiled machine code without any web views like Electron.
Hopefully the desktop story is going improve as Canonical is now leading the Flutter desktop side.
Flutter is a joke on the web, and it consumes as much as Electron, sometimes worse, on a desktop.
I'm not sure if the web render engine has gotten better since then, and am too lazy to look up the links rn, but threads should be easy to find using HN search.
Still seems like a common source language + GUI toolkit that targets the web platform and various native platforms (mainly Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and desktop Linux of course) without significant overhead has not been achieved yet. And it's questionable whether it's possible, given the special requirements (and capabilities) of the web platform and the different native platform.
For Flutter web, yes as it's canvas based it doesn't have all the same web features but generally for crud apps it doesn't much matter, especially if it's near zero effort taking your Flutter mobile and desktop app and putting it on the web. With the new impeller renderer and Wasm improvements it has gotten quite faster too.
The benefit of JavaScript is, that, after Google really pushed it to its limit with V8 and of course NodeJS made it a backend dream, that it is ubiquitous and once written usable everywhere, much kinda like PDF.
Its versatility gave it the advantage over WebAssembly to this day, because it is not as widespread available as JavaScript.
I agree with you, that JavaScript itself is nowadays tantamount with TypeScript - what a giant leap this has been. Angular (2) was the unsung hero here. Angular was harshly criticized when they went TypeScript right from the beginning while still offering a native JavaScript version as well (which was basically unusable to be honest).
It is funny, that the last hideout not featuring TS as their default option is React, while more and more major integral projects like NextJS rely out of the box on TS. ReactJS will fall, too. It wouldn't be the first time regarding innovations coming from other projects. Again Angular is leading the innovation while ReactJS is a follower.
You rarely can go wrong with JavaScript and Python, I would say.
This is a pedantic point, but that's not really what the definition of compiler is as much as a common understanding of it. By definition, it just translates one language into another, and a human-readable to human-readable translation is still a compiler ("transpiler" is more slang than actual formal terminology).
This might just be one of those already lost battles, but like "crypto" being used to mean "digital money" rather than "cryptography", I feel like the new terminology is weird and unnecessary, so it's something I have trouble adapting to even though I rationally know that usage evolves over time and sometimes the words I like less will become the norm.
> This is a pedantic point, but that's not really what the definition of compiler is as much as a common understanding of it. By definition, it just translates one language into another
The history and etymology doesn't support that definition, either; that's just another "common [mis]understanding" of the term. It's in the name. A compiler produces a compilation—an aggregate of multiple subroutines, including user-supplied ones and some by the system/programming environment, transformed into a single program for a given target.
(You're describing the process of "autocoding", a job that every compiler does, and a term that predates "transpiler" but that no one uses because they favor stretching the more frequently encountered term "compiler" for their use case.)
I also agree with your opinion on Angular.
But I like React, so I'm a little sad. Still, I mostly agree with you.
The reasons you criticize React are exactly the reasons I love React. Because it changes slowly, even someone like me can keep up. (Just kidding.)
Not sure what timeline you’re living in, but people absolutely still write tons of JS, and WebAssembly has yet to take over as a commonly used runtime for web applications. You can definitely find examples of companies building on it, but don’t mistake that for the kind of sea change Gary was describing here.
https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2026/05/20/saying-goodbye-to-a...
iirc, v8 never had any special compilation path for it to begin with.
I am hesitant to call that "support". If even Meta can't get their Electron application to work reliably, who can? WhatsApp client for macOS is awful and it's getting worse. Discord is awful and it's getting worse. Spotify works better when running through the browser. At this point, when I see that the application is using Electron, I am assuming it's not supported on my OS and I move on.
Websites have actually long been a great cross-platform mechanism
Just a shame about the giant browser you have to load first
But even document rendering with light scripting is not trivial so yeah, the required browser is the bottleneck.
I always wonder (layman question): couldn't native Electron apps (and similar technologies) save a great deal of RAM by using the same sandboxing model for apps that browsers use for tabs, instead of fully-fledged instances?
Was that an idea that Tauri also tries to implement, or am I remembering this wrongly?
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
And now with typescript and running it in the server... I'd rather just use Java.
js is mutant C with dementia - hacked together over over a fortnight, full of inconsistencies and weird corners.
It's like PHP, it will never die.
I predict that PHP will live a long life, but not as long as C, and I predict JavaScript will have a lifespan closer to C's than PHP's.