> they had a core data structure in Sheets which was blurring the lines between arrays and maps. This is efficient in JavaScript, which automatically models sparse arrays as maps, but slow on other platforms. So they had to rewrite the code in a more platform-agnostic way. This is another thing the team like about WebAssembly: it makes it easier for multiplatform applications to get good performance on the web. You don't have to bend your whole application to the idiosyncrasies of JavaScript.
Uh, that's a terrible example. It's not an example of anyone forced to "bend their whole application to the idiosyncrasies of JS" at all. It's almost the opposite
Someone wrote the code they wanted to write, whether in good taste or not, and the JS runtimes that the product was tested on handled it efficiently (to their credit!); i.e., the authors of those JS runtimes had to bend their implementations to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of people who were/are writing code like that.
Uh, that's a terrible example. It's not an example of anyone forced to "bend their whole application to the idiosyncrasies of JS" at all. It's almost the opposite
Someone wrote the code they wanted to write, whether in good taste or not, and the JS runtimes that the product was tested on handled it efficiently (to their credit!); i.e., the authors of those JS runtimes had to bend their implementations to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of people who were/are writing code like that.