<story><title>JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop</title><url>https://www.wired.com/2016/05/javascript-conquered-web-now-taking-desktop/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aikah</author><text>&amp;gt;  That isn&amp;#x27;t an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications&lt;p&gt;The difference is there is very little room for optimisation in most javascript runtimes. They don&amp;#x27;t support multi-threading and the memory is impossible to manage. &amp;quot;Lower&amp;quot; level languages always allow better performance tweaking when necessary. Javascript allows next to none. You can&amp;#x27;t tell javascript :&amp;quot;Give me an array of 10 elements&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;give me a integer of that length&amp;quot;. So no &amp;quot;headroom&amp;quot; for performances with Javascript.</text></item><item><author>onion2k</author><text>Poorly written websites can bring a desktop PC to its knees, but so can a poorly written native application. That isn&amp;#x27;t an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications. And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn&amp;#x27;t going to take your computer down &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; badly.</text></item><item><author>rplst8</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not an expert, but the memory required to render the seemingly simplest of interfaces in html&amp;#x2F;js&amp;#x2F;css in a browser today seems excessive.  Some web sites bring a reasonably powered desktop to its knees. I&amp;#x27;m not sure I want this problem on my desktop too. Though I guess this is just one step closer to having METAL. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.destroyallsoftware.com&amp;#x2F;talks&amp;#x2F;the-birth-and-death-of-javascript&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.destroyallsoftware.com&amp;#x2F;talks&amp;#x2F;the-birth-and-death...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pcwalton</author><text>&amp;gt; They don&amp;#x27;t support multi-threading&lt;p&gt;Yes, they do, via Web Workers. They just don&amp;#x27;t support multithreading at the level of concurrent access to the DOM, and they don&amp;#x27;t support shared memory. Very few native libraries support concurrent access to UI widgets, and not many native applications make heavy use of shared memory for compute either. (Most native applications don&amp;#x27;t have heavy compute needs in the first place…)&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Give me an array of 10 elements&lt;p&gt;new Array(10)?&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; give me a integer of that length&lt;p&gt;Uint8Array, Uint16Array, Uint32Array?</text></comment>
<story><title>JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop</title><url>https://www.wired.com/2016/05/javascript-conquered-web-now-taking-desktop/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aikah</author><text>&amp;gt;  That isn&amp;#x27;t an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications&lt;p&gt;The difference is there is very little room for optimisation in most javascript runtimes. They don&amp;#x27;t support multi-threading and the memory is impossible to manage. &amp;quot;Lower&amp;quot; level languages always allow better performance tweaking when necessary. Javascript allows next to none. You can&amp;#x27;t tell javascript :&amp;quot;Give me an array of 10 elements&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;give me a integer of that length&amp;quot;. So no &amp;quot;headroom&amp;quot; for performances with Javascript.</text></item><item><author>onion2k</author><text>Poorly written websites can bring a desktop PC to its knees, but so can a poorly written native application. That isn&amp;#x27;t an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications. And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn&amp;#x27;t going to take your computer down &lt;i&gt;that&lt;/i&gt; badly.</text></item><item><author>rplst8</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not an expert, but the memory required to render the seemingly simplest of interfaces in html&amp;#x2F;js&amp;#x2F;css in a browser today seems excessive.  Some web sites bring a reasonably powered desktop to its knees. I&amp;#x27;m not sure I want this problem on my desktop too. Though I guess this is just one step closer to having METAL. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.destroyallsoftware.com&amp;#x2F;talks&amp;#x2F;the-birth-and-death-of-javascript&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.destroyallsoftware.com&amp;#x2F;talks&amp;#x2F;the-birth-and-death...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mmatants</author><text>Most performance problems with websites&amp;#x2F;webapps out there are just due to sheer nastiness of the shovelware that they embed. No need to have fine-tuned debugging and profiling when the main fix is &amp;quot;don&amp;#x27;t accidentally run this jQuery selector 1000 times on every click&amp;quot;. Very low hanging fruit.</text></comment>