How has AI changed the way we think about JavaScript's evolution?

AI Impact on JavaScript Feature Design00:00

With AI, people are writing more and more JavaScript, resulting in a ton of code being produced. This creates a challenge when designing new JavaScript features intended to help developers write code more easily. If AI enables people to write less code, there may be less need for features that simply make the language nicer to work with. Features useful when somebody just vibes code in an AI project may differ from what human developers need, and companies care about being able to use AI properly for their code. This may require rethinking what makes syntax good when considering both developers and AI systems.

The goal remains to design code that is better for the people who will read it, though it is very early to determine how this will affect language designers.

WebAssembly's Evolution and JavaScript Integration00:32

For years since WebAssembly was first introduced, people have noted many missing capabilities. WebAssembly cannot access the DOM, which is necessary to build a web page. WebAssembly is gaining capabilities that improve integration with JavaScript, including the Wasm GC (Garbage Collection) proposal, which allows WebAssembly to use JavaScript objects, and promise integration, which enables WebAssembly to handle things that JavaScript normally deals with.

It remains unclear whether full parity with JavaScript is a goal for WebAssembly. JavaScript is not considered a bad programming language, so even if WebAssembly becomes as capable, people would likely continue using JavaScript rather than abandoning it entirely. JavaScript will probably remain the primary language for web development despite WebAssembly's improvements.