At the moment, WASM is far from ideal to run anything that requires a GC as there's no GC in WASM yet and it seems it will take a long time for it to finally get one. So even running Java or Go in WASM is not easy at all (though there are compilers already - but they won't just run any program, they are extremely limited)... now, to run dynamic languages on top of a typed bytecode without GC... that has to be a huge challenge! Why do you think Python/Lua can run perfomantly on WASM?

> What makes you think WASM is going to give developers an appetite for statically typed languages?

Well, they did say it will give TypeScript developers better alternatives. Presumably, if you're using TypeScript, you already had an appetite for statically typed languages.

I suppose it depends on what problem you use TypeScript to solve. If you're writing a complicated and self-contained system, sure, I can see the appeal of "upgrading" to Java. If you're trying to enforce contracts between different codebases/libraries/etc., WASM hardly provides a better alternative: integrating with other libraries—especially JS ones—or even the DOM is non-trivial.

Which is to say, using TypeScript as a quality of life improvement to provide autocomplete and checking for easily-detectable bugs is not going to lend itself well to being replaced with WASM. If the goal is to write a 100% typed codebase (e.g., having a complex, entirely self-contained tool that runs in multiple environments), you will have better luck. But I suspect the number of folks that could benefit from that are fairly low, because it assumes that JavaScript is the bottleneck for correctness and performance. But if the real reason why you're using TypeScript is that JavaScript was your only choice and you like the increase in safety, having a more appropriate language could be an even more attractive option.