Thanks for your thoughts... but I think Electron already changed everything. Perhaps we should already start thinking of Chrome as a platform library for device-independence. Pretty sure Google has a long range vision to make the web an app' platform, which is to take the Web quite far from its static content origins. It's amazing JS has taken us so far, but it cannot take us all the way to full screen, 3D gaming, even with web assembly.
When you think of the success of Atom then the VS code derivative, it must be down to the fact Chrome is such a brilliant base for programming at the application layer. The VS Code plugin market is now so vigorous that it is difficult to justify an alternative IDE. But there are so many other applications, and games, that need similar rock-solid device independence to authors from re-inventing low level support. Perhaps we don't have to stick with a high level language to be productive. The V8 engine is doing such a great job, that it is difficult to imagine a replacement... If only there was a language that was as friendly for authoring as typescript but could 'hit the metal' without being interpreted... ;) Typescript is currently a 'JS with annotations' aimed at improving developer collaboration and IDE leverage, but there is a tremendously valuable gap opening up, seems unlikely that TS will ever compile. Maybe there is a sandbox constraint stopping progress here, I don't have enough technical insight, but apart from Apple, there is very little vetting of native binaries as it is, at least with a Chrome library dependency some end-user safeguarding checks are imaginable.
