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JavaScript: Love, Hate, and Standardization

Recently, I’ve read a lot of hate toward JavaScript (which is easy to explain, see my previous post titled “Programming Language Wars“), and specifically there are a number of people who would request that browser vendors and the web standards organizations implement additional/alternative programming languages. This is a very naive request that I believe stems from lack of respect for standardization and the challenges facing browser development.

First of all, “JavaScript”, AKA ECMAScript AKA ECMA-262 AKA ISO/IEC 16262, exists primarily as a standardization, and that’s the important part here. Despite its origins, JavaScript has been around for decades, and likely will persist as such for decades, maybe even centuries to come. It was selected to be the core of the programming side of the standardized web. This standardization has been of particular benefit to making the web more or less completely compatible between a variety of browsers. JavaScript is defined in clearly written specifications, and as a result, each implementation, from Firefox’s Spidermonkey, to Chrome’s V8, to the dozens of other complete implementations, can be implemented separately and therefore be mutually independent from one another, while at the same time each supporting the same code so long as the developers making these products follow the standards correctly. This also affords freedom for competition to create distinct implementations instead of relying on a centralized one, which cultivates innovation.

There are many different languages that have a similar standardization and specification process, but this is not the only important characteristic of JavaScript. As a language designed for the web, it cannot make any presumptions of the architecture on which it will run. This means it would need to be provided as a scripting language (which JavaScript is), or a language of virtual machine bytecode (which WebAssembly is, which I’ll get into later). In addition to this, the language is supposed to be entirely forward compatible, so that code written a long time ago is capable of running on newer engines without modification. On some languages, this requirement can be, and is, safely ignored. Allowing things to be routinely deprecated and changed breaks old code. Often in these cases, the solution is simply to run the code on an outdated interpreter. This is not an option for browser vendors, however, whose releases already push several hundred megabytes in size, to say nothing of the nightmare of deciding which versions are still to be shipped, or the support nightmare of requiring end-users to manually choose their interpreter versions. These characteristics rule out a number of other possible languages.

Yet another issue with implementing other languages is the prevalence of JavaScript. Whether or not you like it, which is really not of concern here, JavaScript is arguably the most popular programming language in the world right now. Its forgiving nature cultivates ease of use for the beginner, largely due to being untyped and having automatic garbage collection. Additionally, the massive amount of development done due to the importance of the web has made JavaScript very performant. It also has a very C-like syntax, which is very popular and familiar to many developers.

Some people are hasty to criticize a language or library for catering to the needs of the less-experienced. These people usually complain about the loss of quality by making programming more accessible. But as is usually the case, ease of use does not preclude advanced functionality. JavaScript is a very mature language, and as such, it has a large user base that demands access to more advanced features and the ability to optimize performance more than an entry-level user requires.

And finally, and in my opinion, the biggest reason against implementing new languages for the browser is maintainability. As I write this, the Chromium JavaScript implementation, V8, has 1350 open bug reports. This is the number for a single programming language. If the web standards were to mandate the addition of another language, this would have to be implemented in yet another system of roughly equal complexity, and this would cripple the progress of development teams that even now are hard at work steadily advancing the single language implementation they have to maintain already.

All of these arguments aside, however, I fully understand the desire for developers to work in a language that suits their own style. I know the struggle of being forced to work with a programming language that I don’t like. So if I believe that, why do I still deny that other languages should be implemented in the web standards? First of all, I believe the benefit is greatly outweighed by the detrimental effect it would have on the speed of development for the open web standards. Second of all, if new languages are implemented, sooner or later, even those languages will come under fire for essentially the same reasons.

What we need isn’t to explicitly modify those standards to include languages, but to provide a common foundation on which new languages can be founded without requiring modification to the central standard itself. The simple answer to this is an intermediate language or virtual machine.

So far, JavaScript itself has acted as this intermediate language. Languages such as TypeScript, CoffeeScript, and Dart transpile into simplified JavaScript with boilerplate to implement missing features. Emscripten has even allowed the transpiling of languages such as C or C++ into JavaScript.

More recently, however, there is a new standard known as WebAssembly, which I believe solves this problem even better. One of the main purposes of WebAssembly was to provide an avenue for higher performance computing in a browser environment. One of the lowest levels of abstraction of an execution environment is assembly language. It encodes the primitive computational operations of the hardware itself, and has very few, if any, high level features. This lower level of abstraction also means that instructions written in it have little to no overhead. Due to the requirement for web languages to be architecture-neutral and to have some level of access control security, this had to be implemented in a virtual machine architecture that is conceptually close to a CPU architecture, but with a universal specification, and the ability to restrict the execution context to resources that it should have access to. This design is remarkably similar to the design of the Java virtual machine.

In the future, I suspect that many more programming languages will have either integrated or third-party backends that allow software to be compiled to run in this environment. This will require a fair amount of work to get this completed for each language, but I think it is the best way forward. With this method, any language could become a web-compatible language in the future, without needing to be integrated into the web standards, and without requiring extra work by the browser developers. By funneling all languages into the same intermediate language, it also ensures compatibility between them. And finally, because this method requires a compilation step, it means that if the programming language is updated and breaking changes implemented, previously compiled code will continue to function as normal until recompiled. The breaking changes may therefore still impact the developer, but not the end-user.

So to sum up: NO, new languages should not be integrated into web standards, but YES, developers of other languages should utilize transpiling and WebAssembly to make their languages available for web development. Other web-friendly programming languages should not be competing with JavaScript, they should rather see JavaScript and WebAssembly as their natural choice for an intermediate compilation target.