Posted by em-bee 1 day ago
Browsers operate at a scale never seen before. Imagine all the extra energy and bandwidth needed if core functionality is moved to the application code when you have billions of users.
What we need is more native functionality (implemented in the JS engine with C++ or Rust) to have as less user land code as possible.
As an example, imagine how much energy, bytes, and CPU would be saved if browsers and JS engines included reactivity and JSX. Or if browsers included an API similar to jQuery.
Quick math to grasp the scale: 100kb * 1 billion users = 100TB of data that needs to be transferred and parsed many times, every single day. It's absurd.
Hot take
It is now becoming rare when I see any serious project that still uses JavaScript, everyone I know is using TypeScript and I don't recall any job posts not requiring TypeScript. What are the standards bodies doing? They are still implementing hacks upon JavaScript instead of seeing the writing on the wall.
Maintaining JS engines is difficult because of the old stuff that few developers actually use, it would make a lot more sense to start deprecating those features and adding the new ones developers actually want.
I started using alternatives to NodeJS because I don't feel like I should subject myself to a compilation step if I don't have to.