WebAssembly will finally put an end to the constant battle between browser vendors as to who has the fastest Javascript Engine. The endless benchmarks about how V8 is faster, or Chakra is faster, or SpiderMonkey is faster, and so on and so on. Hundreds of thousands of millions of man hours have been poured into building the fastest JS parsers imaginable, and now WebAssembly is going to come along and side step the whole thing in one go by moving the parsing stage off of the client.
Javascript parsing technology will go down in history as ultimately the biggest waste of time that mankind ever indulged in, all because no one stood up and questioned if this language was even a good fit in the first place. In a few years the WebAssembly creators may even win the Noble Peace Prize for finally ending the biggest battle in the never ending "browser war".
> Javascript parsing technology will go down in history as ultimately the biggest waste of time that mankind ever indulged in
If there is absolutely nothing else in this world that you can think of that might be a bigger waste of time than performance optimizations that have benefited billions of users for many years, you're not trying very hard.
Maybe in a very distant future. In short term most webcontent will still be delivered as Javascript (maybe transpiled from TS & co). WASM will cover some niches, e.g. for running some native applications and games directly in the browser. Or for making some high-performance low-level libraries (which might have a JS API on top).
Besides that WASM is also executed by a Javascript Engine, so it's speed still matters.
> Javascript parsing technology will go down in history as ultimately the biggest waste of time that mankind ever indulged in, all because no one stood up and questioned if this language was even a good fit in the first place.
Javascript, in its current ES2016 version, is a pretty good and powerful language. ES2015 is also fine.
The problem is that most JS code out there has been done in the older versions of Javascript (pre-ES2015), which is really a terrible language (doesn't even have clean and clear variable scoping!).
Javascript parsing technology will go down in history as ultimately the biggest waste of time that mankind ever indulged in, all because no one stood up and questioned if this language was even a good fit in the first place. In a few years the WebAssembly creators may even win the Noble Peace Prize for finally ending the biggest battle in the never ending "browser war".