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by dmit·6y ago·view on hn ↗
I see your point, but I think it only exposes the weakness of the terms "high-level" and "low-level" when used to describe programming languages. Rust is both low-level in that it can be used to write code for very small computers, but also high-level thanks to all the useful abstractions it provides.

There is no axis on which JavaScript (with or without Typescript) is a higher-level language than Rust in 2020. Rust offers a richer standard library, much MUCH more powerful facilities for modeling data, state-of-the-art (de)serialization that's one crate import and a one-liner annotation away.

I don't know who came up with asm.js, but that person definitely knew. JavaScript's destiny is to be a building block. Yes, it feels nice to write plain JS without importing any libraries. It's nice knowing the difference between `Array#slice` and `Array#splice` without looking it up on MDN. But it felt just as nice for ASM coders in the 80s to bypass a C compiler, and look where we are now.