V8 is really an engineering marvel, making such a high-level, dynamically typed language as fast as it is.<p>I see people talking about WASM and “why bother with JS at all”, but keep in mind that JS code is more expressive than WASM, so if you’re aim is to minimize costs you still save bandwidth using JS over WASM. You could argue that it’s negligible or worth the performance increase, but if you’re a big site the cost savings add up, right?<p>Also, JS is of course widely used outside of the browser, and there’s a reason it got so popular: it lets you focus on the domain instead of all the other stuff. I can’t think of another mainstream language I’d rather use to prototype and algorithm, application, system, whatever. And the fact that V8 makes it so fast is the reason people just stick with JS. Gradual typing with TS eliminates the only remaining downside (dynamic typing and a big code base).