top | item 46392217

Ask HN: If browsers had an alternative to JavaScript, what would that be?

3 points| cupofjoakim | 2 months ago

As a javascript/typescript dev of ~15 years I'm growing increasingly sceptic of the languages. It's definitely easy and flexible, but I find that there's an incredible amount of pitfalls that even senior developers run into.

One thing I am certain about is that javascript has gone through a very large amount of changes in it's lifetime – it doesn't look at all like it did when it was released and its' intended usages have changed a lot.

I can't help to think that there has to be a better way. Are we stuck with supporting mutable prototypes forever or what could an alternative look like?

Personally I'd still want a scripting language, but one that would be a lot stricter. No binaries like wasm, less globals, preferably type safe. I'd also prefer if we could go a route that didn't rely on the event loop and supported multiple threads.

1 comment

order

petercooper|1 month ago

Google had a go at doing this with Dart.