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Every 10 years there is a changing of the guard in JavaScript. I think we have just started a period of acceler...
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Very nice piece Shawn! Node.js has identified the desire to start "collapsing layers" of legacy things, but of course doing so in a way that will not break anything in the wild.
I think WebAssembly will be a bigger piece in the next decade than any of us actually realize.
I agree with the other comment - some level of AOT compilation will be useful for performance areas. IE11 finally dies as a significant platform for business web apps on 31/12/2029 and the next decade requires a lot less bundling.
I also think the Svelte model of framework as a compiler has some real legs over the next few years.
Most Likely to Occur
WebAssembly.
Less likely
Chrome manages to convince everyone to implement a browser filesystem API. If that happens, then the web is unleashed even more. But haven't seen other browsers play ball on this one.
Wild 'Fantasy Land' Guess
JavaScript moves beyond JIT in Browsers. Browsers begin to allow TypeScript to compile some hot code that Browsers can run. Chrome (v8) already does this (nothing to do with TypeScript) but there's a start-up cost and developers have no control over it. The idea would be to do it at build/compile time. Not all your code is optimized but some of it is. So people could still push normal code if they didn't care about that.
JavaScript has a very limited future in my mind. With new technologies like Rust and WebAssembly taking over and languages like Elm trying to perfect web-development rising, I do not see any potential future where JavaScript stays.
Heck, even other technologies I hate like Golang and Python have a high chance on their own to kill JavaScript. If JavaScript wants to survive, Deno is the only technology that will keep it that way. Even then it also fairly well supports TypeScript, which can itself take over and kill JavaScript.
TypeScript is a superset of javascript, so it wouldn't really be possible for it to kill javascript.
The day rust becomes the norm for frontend web development, I think I'll stop building things for the web. For a server, sure, even though I much prefer go over rust, but for the frontend? I sure don't hope so.
Rust and WebAssembly are only for low level - high performance programming needs. They'll never replace JavaScript for a productive dev experience and thus can't be the reason for JavaScript's end. My 2 cents on that. :)
JavaScript is in advantage compared to other technologies. But it should die some day!
I think in the next years we should go back to the roots - get rid of the node_modules massive bloat (even the hello world app in any JS framework nowadays requires tens of MB of node_modules, including is-number, is-even and is-odd!), abandon very often failing node-gyp, use lightweight and ultrafast JS libraries like Riot.js, parallelize JS using Web Workers, simplify web development like in good old days of a single
<script src="jquery.min.js"></script>. Deno and Vite are small steps in a good direction.chart source, for future editing excalidraw.com/#json=4802174517248... feel free to fork it and prettify/add stuff