Wasm does count, and you can say the same about Go and others.

Sure, they run, but they can't touch the DOM or do much that's very interesting without JavaScript.

Js just runs as is. Atwood's Law and all that.

I remember a time ...

Why doesn’t wasm count?

Compile step makes things more complicated.

As opposed to minimized JS.

You don’t need to minimize JS to be able to run it.

why would the tool minify the script it generated?

Same problem, different orders of magnitude.

May I ask, what is this obsession with targeting the browser? I've also noticed a hatred of k8s here, and while I truly understand it, I'd take the complication of managing infrastructure over frontend fads any day.

HN has a hatred of K8s? That’s new to me

K8s is used in many situations it shouldn't be, and a lot of HNers (including me) are bitter about having to deal with the resulting messes

This is a site for startups. They have no business running k8s, in fact, many of the lessons learned get passed on from graybeards to the younger generation along those lines. Perhaps I'm wrong! I'd love to talk shop somewhere.

java did run in the browser once.... it was embedded directly on the browser there was also nsapi

you could also run java with js if you are brave enough https://kreijstal.github.io/java-tools/

Java runs in the browser currently, after a transpilation step (same as .ts):

https://teavm.org/

Also CheerpJ (with support for Swing UIs even), Closure compiler, and now GraalVM also has an experimental WasmGC target.