I&#x27;m sorry, this is going to be a rant.  Feel free to ignore if you don&#x27;t care about my opinions on the subject.<p>The open web has nothing to do with &quot;view source&quot;.  It never did.  &quot;View source&quot; just makes debugging easier, it&#x27;s a technical solution to a technical problem.  It&#x27;s why we use JSON or XML instead of ASN.1 for our daily work.<p>The open web is a web where no company is the gatekeeper.  It&#x27;s a web where we have multiple browsers, competing JS engines, et cetera.  No one company can hold the web hostage.  This is exactly why Flash, Java, ActiveX, and Sliverlight failed.  Every one of those technologies was owned by a single company.  Every one of those technologies failed because it&#x27;s impossible for one company to be the gatekeeper for a technology that is supposed to run on billions of heterogenous devices.<p>So the lessons of Flash are this: don&#x27;t put all of your eggs in the Adobe basket.<p>Meanwhile, you&#x27;re fighting against WebAssembly because you are ideologically against black box software.  Getting rid of WebAssembly does not actually achieve that goal.  It&#x27;s like you&#x27;re fighting against condoms because they encourage promiscuity.  The promiscuity is already there, and condoms just make it a better experience for everyone involved.<p>----<p>Footnote: JavaScript is on par with Python&#x2F;Ruby&#x2F;Lisp in a lot of ways, but there are some important deficiencies with respect to typing and static analysis, deficiencies which cause actual bugs in real world problems and cost developers time and money to deal with.  It&#x27;s why we&#x27;ve been inventing TypeScript, Flow, Dart, CoffeeScript, et cetera.  You say that other people&#x27;s problems with JS are &quot;superficial&quot;, but that&#x27;s exactly how I see your problems with WebAssembly.<p>People are going to write code in C++ because they can hit performance targets on platforms where they ship native code, and WebAssembly means a lot to the folks working with Unity, Unreal, or thousands of other existing projects which the new open web.  The new open web, with WebAssembly, is an open web with more diversity than ever before, rather than a JavaScript monoculture.