<story><title>V8 release v6.6</title><url>https://v8project.blogspot.com/2018/03/v8-release-66.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tim_hutton</author><text>I like JavaScript a lot, I&amp;#x27;ve got no problem with it. But when WebAssembly can access the DOM (or replace it) it seems likely that performance-critical code will use that instead.</text></item><item><author>fvdessen</author><text>JavaScript ES6 is actually a very pleasant language to program in. JS already had good foundations with first class JSON, closures and event based asynchronous programming. Now it has a modern syntax with await, classes, destructuring, default parameters, the spread operator, etc. Add to that an incredible debugger and amazing performance. Frankly at this point JS can stand on its own as a great programming language.</text></item><item><author>tim_hutton</author><text>Is there still a need for performant JavaScript now that we have WebAssembly?&lt;p&gt;Edit: Apologies for wording this poorly. Clearly there is a need for performant JavaScript. My question is more about how much we expect WebAssembly to take over from what JavaScript is currently used for. Thank you for all the insightful comments!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fvdessen</author><text>AFAIK web assembly is not much faster than native javascript for general purpose code. I think the main usage of web assembly will be in optimising hot paths in math libraries, codecs and various performance sensitive code, but those are not critical parts for the majority of JS projects.</text></comment>
<story><title>V8 release v6.6</title><url>https://v8project.blogspot.com/2018/03/v8-release-66.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tim_hutton</author><text>I like JavaScript a lot, I&amp;#x27;ve got no problem with it. But when WebAssembly can access the DOM (or replace it) it seems likely that performance-critical code will use that instead.</text></item><item><author>fvdessen</author><text>JavaScript ES6 is actually a very pleasant language to program in. JS already had good foundations with first class JSON, closures and event based asynchronous programming. Now it has a modern syntax with await, classes, destructuring, default parameters, the spread operator, etc. Add to that an incredible debugger and amazing performance. Frankly at this point JS can stand on its own as a great programming language.</text></item><item><author>tim_hutton</author><text>Is there still a need for performant JavaScript now that we have WebAssembly?&lt;p&gt;Edit: Apologies for wording this poorly. Clearly there is a need for performant JavaScript. My question is more about how much we expect WebAssembly to take over from what JavaScript is currently used for. Thank you for all the insightful comments!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dspillett</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; performance-critical code will use that instead&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, but how much of the browser code out there is is truly performance &lt;i&gt;critical&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;For a lot of code out there it is important that it perform well enough but it won&amp;#x27;t see much benefit from WebAssembly because of bottlenecks elsewhere (the DOM, the user, the network). Keeping the maintainability benefits JS currently has over WA is a bonus worth paying a small performance price, but you still want that price to be as small as practically possible.&lt;p&gt;As WA and the toolchanins for which it is the final compile target mature, this may change. But I suspect JS has a place, a place where performance considerations are often not insignificant, for some time to come, with WA for extra performance in truly critical areas (i.e. proper number crunching).</text></comment>