You're wading into a discussion that is above you. Generally that isn't a good idea.
JavaScript proper cannot be a high performance language because of fundamental design choices. Asm.js, which I've referenced multiple times, undoes many of those choices, effectively becoming a completely different language (which is why you target it with C/C++ and LLVM, not by writing it directly). The notion that there are going to be legitimate video stream processing or h264 decoders in JavaScript -- that are more than a impractical "if you ignore normal considerations" demo -- is 0%. It makes no sense, and it is using the wrong tool, making everything into a nail because someone "knows JavaScript". This is doubly true on mobile where you want to make every instruction count.
All of the examples in here are a riot. Further gaming in HTML5 thus far has been "welcome to the 80s". It has gone nowhere. Nor has any other "pure JavaScript" high computing adventure. nodejs, which I love, is a wonderful asynchronous glue, but everyone knows that you dare not do any actual computations in it because...JavaScript.
> You're wading into a discussion that is above you. Generally that isn't a good idea.
Making assumptions about the knowledge of people you're responding to is cool though.
> Further gaming in HTML5 thus far has been "welcome to the 80s".
Oh, see I guess I was thinking Unreal 3 and Sauerbraten were released much more recently than that. Oops, silly me.
You're right, the browser should just only ever be for web pages, everything should just stay how it is now and all these damn kids should get off your lawn.
The Unreal 3 demo was an entirely different thing. Asm.js is a dramatic rethinking of JavaScript that tosses much of the language, and adds hacked typing metadata, to essentially act as a proxy for C. The single benefit that it brings over just going with C is that existing browsers can limpingly run it in crippled mode.
You're right
And then you boringly completely misrepresent my argument. You should tell the kids to get off your lawn, as you're busy trying to pretend everything is a nail because all you know is your hammer.
It's interesting you truncated my example which was pre-Asm.js but still managed to be playable.
They took a shortcut, sure. Historically JS performance hasn't supported that kind of application, and thus there are few modern or impressive 3d game engines written in it.
You were wondering why we want JS to be faster, there's your answer. I'm not sure what's left to explain.
You seem to be saying "Browsers shouldn't do X because they are too slow." "Barring X, browsers are plenty fast and don't need to be any faster." I'm not sure why you don't see that those cancel out. Also X seems to be a fairly vague set of applications, some of which have working demos.
Regarding "my" nails and hammers, I'm actually not a huge fan of much of the tech involved in modern browsers. I'm just not able to ignore what Mozilla and Google are accomplishing here nor the interest that it garners from developers as a cross-platform VM. Can we stop trying to insult me out of having a valid opinion?
If we want make this personal - personally, I don't really care about any platform besides the ones I use, and those (deliberately) tend to be easy targets for portable C/C++.
That's apparently too much work though; people want (to at least believe they have) a single target. The browser is coming to be an option for that, whether anyone likes it or not.
JavaScript proper cannot be a high performance language because of fundamental design choices. Asm.js, which I've referenced multiple times, undoes many of those choices, effectively becoming a completely different language (which is why you target it with C/C++ and LLVM, not by writing it directly). The notion that there are going to be legitimate video stream processing or h264 decoders in JavaScript -- that are more than a impractical "if you ignore normal considerations" demo -- is 0%. It makes no sense, and it is using the wrong tool, making everything into a nail because someone "knows JavaScript". This is doubly true on mobile where you want to make every instruction count.
All of the examples in here are a riot. Further gaming in HTML5 thus far has been "welcome to the 80s". It has gone nowhere. Nor has any other "pure JavaScript" high computing adventure. nodejs, which I love, is a wonderful asynchronous glue, but everyone knows that you dare not do any actual computations in it because...JavaScript.