The JavaScript Midlife Crisis

Alternatively, there's a pool of JS developers who shouldn't be maintaining critical infrastructure to begin with.

It's not a black box, those codebases are usually open and the only thing holding you or anyone back is learning anything outside of a small pond of JavaScript.

Write non-browser-things in fast languages. It is not a complicated concept - even less so in an era where stuff is getting written for you.

See this post by Mike Pall, author of LuaJIT (which is comparable to or faster than V8 performance-wise, despite being basically a single-developer project), which explains why: https://web.archive.org/web/20180603053407/http://article.gm.... Basically, it’s much easier to add high-quality runtime-trace-aware recompilation to a JIT interpreter, which a non-trace-aware compiled language will often not be able to beat.

Speed matters. WebAssembly is taking jobs from JavaScript precisely because it's faster.

The calculation engine for Google Sheets became twice as fast with the switch to WebAssembly: https://web.dev/case-studies/google-sheets-wasmgc

The Amazon Prime Video app became twice as fast with less variability in performance when they switched to WebAssembly: https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-...

Compiling to WebAssembly enables every language to run in the browser. Google used Java and Amazon used Rust.

Large parts of the JavaScript application space too.

Language consistency, ergonomics, standard library and performance matters, and JS has major warts here. I bet when these languages are 30+ years old like JS is, the software landscape isn't dominated nearly as much by JS.

These days I intentionally start all projects with as little JS as possible, opting for Go and HTMX instead. Removing the layers of JS inconsistency and build tools makes my and my agents lives better.

More thoughts on my JS-less stack here: https://housecat.com/blog/the-hugs-stack-hypermedia-unix-go-...

And yes, I ask myself the question: "Who in his right mind would run JavaScript on the server and even write business logic in it?" Lots of idiots in this world it seems. JavaScript is the reason our text editors need 16GB of RAM to run these days and a simple weather app 1GB.

In the ol' days assembly programmers probably could've written the weather app in a couple of KB (that's a MILLION times less memory people).

You can argue that high-throughput / low-latency dev tools are one of these environments. I'm not so sure. I think a lot of JS tooling is written in slow JS and gets fast with a rewrite to another language largely because of better structure.

Some environments really are tougher though. I started using WebAssembly a lot a year ago and the story for JavaScript and Python is just pretty terrible. And for JS, the things that make it hard to run in Wasm aren't universally good things to have in the language in the first place. The extreme dynamism of JS is something that so much JS tooling tries to limit.

But I think a lot of the language is quite good, and that there are possible variants of JS that are great even. I started one I hope will fit that one day (https://zena-lang.dev) and the first use cases for me are all tooling to try to make sure it's at least good for that: self-hosted compiler, formatter, regex engine, JSON parser, etc. It's quite a bit like JS/TS, but fixes a lot of things and runs forward with features that will take JS many years to get to, if it ever does (ie, pipelines, pattern matching).

I'm hoping that WebAssembly can slowly continue to gain a place on the web so JS can give up its near monopoly there. We'll see!

Obviously - using native non-portable language/compiler features - you can reach some worthwhile speedup for certain workloads. But I have yet to see any of these "we rewrote our build system to Rust" type blog posts utilize any them.

It's always the apples-to-oranges marketing style drivel. Just because the some assertion comes from a very (very!) large company or well-known community member doesn't mean it is true.

In all my years of lurking this site, this port mortem is one of the few articles on this topic I trust: https://zaplib.com/docs/blog_post_mortem.html

This argument can also be applied to the separate, startup time performance axis. Though there are more tradeoffs there.

If you need a web app for CRUD, avoid frameworks, typescript, tailwind, nothing, just bare-naked node/html/css/js

If you need games in the browser or stuff where every byte needs optimization go with WASM

A programmer's life has become simpler

when i first started learning programming i thought it was super important to pick one language to be really good at and that could do everything but you dont have to pick just one.

i honestly think learning it opened my mind to thinking about programming differently and is probably better in the end

Found it.