Damn, 26 people, let’s assume they get paid reasonably well, though they probably aren’t all developers. I’m going to assume 100K on average, just spit balling.
That’s two and a half million dollars per year to build a terminal (very conservative estimate). And, like, does it reeeeealy do more then other terminals? Especially when you include different shells with plugins? AI, it’s so hot right now, but it is better than zsh or fish autocomplete? I built the simplest AI shell script to ask GPT-4 questions, easy, many FOSS options already out there, is that not good enough for people?
Yeah, I’m just having trouble figuring out how this isn’t a waste of time and will implode when seed funding dries up.
Well, there is webassembly, this will enable static programming languages like c, c++, and rust. Rust is high enough level that it’s a pretty good sell for web apps. Even so, once webassembly calms down, we can build alternative interpreters that run on it, and run Python/Go/Java/etc. in the web. This will not be quite as efficent, but as c is about 50% slower in webassembly than on native hardware, I think a Go/Java would run well, Python might be a bit behind, but Lua is simple enough it might work.
TLDR: You don’t have to kill JS to get those language functionalities, just wait for webassembly and all the cool stuff that comes about from that.
Caveat: Though I’m a developer, I’m not a webassembly developer. I’ve heard of these things as theoretical possibilities, but don’t know the specific limitations. Sounds promising but who knows how long it will take to get there.