asm.js was the opposite of an alternative to JavaScript: It was a performant JavaScript dialect used as a compilation target for various languages otherwise targeting emscripten.
WASM is the spiritual successor to that, getting rid of the (in retrospect quite hilarious) "embedded backwards compatibility layer".
edit: for the record, I think having only one doc type (html) and only one scripting language (js) in the browser is a terrible idea.
I don't know what the other doc types and programming languages should be but performance alone seems like a poor idea. A compile target seems even worse. :)
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The assumption is that javascript is bad and that the solution is to not fix it. asm.js was another example.
asm.js was the opposite of an alternative to JavaScript: It was a performant JavaScript dialect used as a compilation target for various languages otherwise targeting emscripten.
WASM is the spiritual successor to that, getting rid of the (in retrospect quite hilarious) "embedded backwards compatibility layer".
You don't compile to js because js is slow.
edit: for the record, I think having only one doc type (html) and only one scripting language (js) in the browser is a terrible idea.
I don't know what the other doc types and programming languages should be but performance alone seems like a poor idea. A compile target seems even worse. :)