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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
To be fair, implementing something like Spotify 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?
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
> 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.
> 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.
You got sources to back this up, or is this just you're opinion?
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> asm.js (that's been deprecated, hasn't it?)
https://spidermonkey.dev/blog/2026/05/20/saying-goodbye-to-a...
iirc, v8 never had any special compilation path for it to begin with.
> 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
To be fair, implementing something like Spotify 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?
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.
I love(?) that he absolutely predicted a global disaster between 2020-2025, he just got the wrong type. Which is very JavaScript.
He was pretty close to being NaN% correct.
Every few years, we invent a better JavaScript. Then we transpile it to JavaScript.
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.
Mass adoption trumps good design every time.
I skim though it and saw they had something javascript asm.js in kernel.
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
There are a ton of reasons to object to JS but the syntax? It isn’t even all that unique.
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.
s/JS/PHP
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.
The syntax? I got 99 problems with js, but syntax ain't one of them. It's just C-style syntax, no?
"YavaScript" made me smile.
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.
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.
I review many sites/month from different clients. They are all using some form of JavaScript.
It's like PHP, it will never die.
"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.
> 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.
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.
The JS death and AI bubble are two events I keep hearing about but will never come.
The AI bubble is now, maybe you mean the AI bubble pop
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.
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.
I don't think Javascript is still interpreted though?