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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
> 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.
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.”
> 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 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?
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.
People choosing Flutter would say the uniformity of a canvas across all browsers is more valuable than gaining the inconsistently implemented web feature set.
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
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.
NaN is a standardized dynamic languages datatype governed by IEEE 754, this is not something to complain about as its behavior is part of the official standard and for good reason, as outlined in the standard.
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.
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.
To be fair there were a couple of disasters, such as [object Array] and undefined.
Feels like the world is hanging on a single thread by now.
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.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Where does it consume more than Electron?
Darts an amazing language too.
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.
On desktop does flutter have native access to the machine it's running on? Can it talk to printers for example?
Of course, via FFI. Not sure why one would think it couldn't, it's just a programming language based GUI framework after all.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
> People say Electron is heavy and not great, but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once.
But why make an app when websites is enough? And I don't need to run n web browsers for that.
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.
The WebAssembly component people are pushing Wasm as a replacement for container-based virtualization, so it's not that far off.
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
> 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.
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.”
> 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.
V8 also supported AOT for asmjs but it's since been removed as well.
> 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.
> 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 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?
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.
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.
People choosing Flutter would say the uniformity of a canvas across all browsers is more valuable than gaining the inconsistently implemented web feature set.
Every few years, we invent a better JavaScript. Then we transpile it to JavaScript.
Mass adoption trumps good design every time.
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
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.
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
There are a ton of reasons to object to JS but the syntax? It isn’t even all that unique.
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?
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.
NaN is a standardized dynamic languages datatype governed by IEEE 754, this is not something to complain about as its behavior is part of the official standard and for good reason, as outlined in the standard.
Reminds me of one of Microsoft's first Dynamic HTML demos:
There were two buttons, one labeled "Our Web Site", the other labeled "Our Competitor's Web Site".
When you moved the mouse over the "Our Competitor's Web Site" button, it would quickly slide out from under your cursor before you could click it!
Then when you stopped moving your mouse, the "Our Web Site" button would slyly slide right underneath your mouse!
Dammit Microsoft!!! ;)
I skim though it and saw they had something javascript asm.js in kernel.
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
"YavaScript" made me smile.
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?
Let's just say it's open to interpretation.