The word meant is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Meant - by who? The technology itself doesn’t want anything.
Do some people want to use wasm instead of JavaScript for websites? Yes. Will JS ever be removed from web browsers? Probably not, no. Wasm isn’t a grand design with a destiny it’s “meant to” reach. It’s actually just some code written by a bunch of people trying to solve a bunch of disparate problems. How well wasm solves any particular problem depends on the desires and skills of the people in the room, pushing the technology forward.
It’s kind of like that for everything. Rust was never meant to be a high performance systems language by its original creator. But the people in the room pushed it in that direction. Fuscia could replace Linux in Android. I’m sure some people want that to happen, and some people don’t. There’s no manifest destiny. What actually happens depends on a lot of arguing in meeting rooms somewhere. How that turns out is anyone’s guess!
The people who created the project and who are writing the code, obviously. This is clear from the context; you don't need to nitpick stuff like this.
> Wasm isn’t a grand design with a destiny it’s “meant to” reach.
Yes it is. The destiny is being able to create dynamic websites with languages other than Javascript. The first step was Asm.js which allowed compiling other languages to Javascript. Then we got WASM which compiles them to a binary format instead. But you still need some Javascript glue to interact with the DOM APIs. And now there are extensions in progress that will remove that requirement (GC, reference types etc).
> Rust was never meant to be a high performance systems language by its original creator.
Yeah citation needed. The very first compiler release already described it as "a strongly-typed systems programming language with a focus on memory safety and concurrency."
https://web.archive.org/web/20130728230358/https://mail.mozi...
Even before that the website described it as "a programming language for low-level, safe code."
https://web.archive.org/web/20110924054534/http://www.rust-l...
> The people who created the project and who are writing the code, obviously. This is clear from the context; you don't need to nitpick stuff like this.
This isn't a nitpick, it's an important point.
Even on a small project, but especially at a huge company, there will be different ambitions and motivations for doing things.
ie, one person wants Fuchsia to eventually take over all of Google's OSes, another wants a secure IoT OS, another just wants a cool research project to pursue ideas about OSes they've had since grad school, etc...
Active State had plugins to run Python, Tcl and Perl on the browser for example.
This distinction really seems to matter to some people. I suppose there’s something tribal about it. Is rust here to destroy C++? Rust gets a lot of irrational hate in the C++ community, and I think this perception is the reason. Is Fuscia here to destroy Android? To some, this will be a very emotionally important question.
> Yeah citation needed. The very first compiler release already described it as "a strongly-typed systems programming language (…)”
This is the article I’m thinking about, titled “The rust I wanted had no future”. Well worth a read: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html
> Performance: A lot of people in the Rust community think "zero cost abstraction" is a core promise of the language. I would never have pitched this and still, personally, don't think it's good.
