Gary Bernhardt's 2013 WebAssembly prediction is now real

Gary Bernhardt's 2013 conference talk "The Birth and Death of JavaScript" sketched a future where a portable bytecode would eventually displace JavaScript in native performance contexts. WebAssembly, formally specified in 2019, has followed that trajectory. WASM is the compilation target for Figma's rendering engine and underpins growing Cloudflare Workers deployments. JavaScript persists, but the coexistence Bernhardt described—JavaScript everywhere, with something more portable beneath it—has materialized.