JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
1–10 of 270 posts
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#2I'm not an expert, but the memory required to render the seemingly simplest of interfaces in html/js/css in a browser today seems excessive. Some web sites bring a reasonably powered desktop to its knees. I'm not sure I want this problem on my desktop too. Though I guess this is just one step closer to having METAL. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#3I'm not an expert, but the memory required to render the seemingly simplest of interfaces in html/js/css in a browser today seems excessive. Some web sites bring a reasonably powered desktop to its knees. I'm not sure I want this problem on my desktop too. Though I guess this is just one step closer to having METAL. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
It is pretty excessive, but maybe web assembly would find a real home in making applications that do well on both native and web.
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#4Linux is more successful on the desktop than it's ever been, and Gnome is largely powered by JavaScript. The Gnome extensions repository is a huge JavaScript success. Never before has WM customization been so accessible.
The Universal Windows Platform also has a JavaScript API that is a breeze compared to the old Win32 development process.
Electron is good but just the tip of the iceberg. I think it says more that major OSes have bet their future on JavaScript.
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#5I'm not an expert, but the memory required to render the seemingly simplest of interfaces in html/js/css in a browser today seems excessive. Some web sites bring a reasonably powered desktop to its knees. I'm not sure I want this problem on my desktop too. Though I guess this is just one step closer to having METAL. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
No one likes that, but
1) HTML/CSS/JS is sill the only truly cross-platform (mac/windows/linux/web/ios/android/etc.) UI platform/ecosystem in 2016, and it will probably stay that way in the foreseeable future because OS makers love their walled gardens.
2) An app's memory efficiency is not a top 10 priority of an average solo-or-small-team developer's concerns, because that's not what most users pay for.
Electron/NW.js apps will only become more common, so I hope things will improve with asm.js/webassembly/etc.
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#6I'm not an expert, but the memory required to render the seemingly simplest of interfaces in html/js/css in a browser today seems excessive. Some web sites bring a reasonably powered desktop to its knees. I'm not sure I want this problem on my desktop too. Though I guess this is just one step closer to having METAL. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Too much wishful thinking during the second half of the talk, though.
Also, while fancy runtime systems can improve the performance of dynamic[0] languages, it doesn't come for free: the price to be paid is the loss of elegance. For instance, a JIT compiler could inline a virtual method that seems not to be overridden anywhere, but if later on it turns out that the virtual method was overridden somewhere, the “optimization” has to be undone. How can anyone in their right mind trust a language that requires such dirty implementation tricks to achieve decent performance?
[0] By which I mean “less amenable to static analysis”, regardless of whether the language has a static type system. For instance, Java and C# are dynamic languages in this sense.
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#7I'm not an expert, but the memory required to render the seemingly simplest of interfaces in html/js/css in a browser today seems excessive. Some web sites bring a reasonably powered desktop to its knees. I'm not sure I want this problem on my desktop too. Though I guess this is just one step closer to having METAL. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
It is pretty excessive, but maybe web assembly would find a real home in making applications that do well on both native and web.
WebAssembly will hopefully end JavaScript's stranglehold on the web.
The justification for using JavaScript for server/desktop/mobile applications seems to essentially be that a certain large group of programmers only know JavaScript.
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#8Linux is more successful on the desktop than it's ever been, and Gnome is largely powered by JavaScript. The Gnome extensions repository is a huge JavaScript success. Never before has WM customization been so accessible. The Universal Windows Platform also has a JavaScript API that is a breeze compared to the old Win32 development process. Electron is good but just the tip of the iceberg. I think it says more that ma…
More likely they see a lot of programmers who only know JavaScript and they want to offer them something.
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is pretty excessive, but maybe web assembly would find a real home in making applications that do well on both native and web.
WebAssembly will hopefully end JavaScript's stranglehold on the web. The justification for using JavaScript for server/desktop/mobile applications seems to essentially be that a certain large group of programmers only know JavaScript.
Agreed, Im so tired of being forced to write js.
Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop
#10I'm not an expert, but the memory required to render the seemingly simplest of interfaces in html/js/css in a browser today seems excessive. Some web sites bring a reasonably powered desktop to its knees. I'm not sure I want this problem on my desktop too. Though I guess this is just one step closer to having METAL. https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
I feel your pain. My first computer had 4K of RAM; my second had 48K; my third, 640K. I learned to work small. It pains me to see the equivalent of Hello World taking up untold MB.
But when I think about software as a business rather than an art, I have to concede that it's a very rare circumstance where RAM efficiency matters as much as I'd like. Note the way the cost of memory has declined:
http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm
Watches now have 100,000 times the RAM that I started with. Costs are dropping by 1-2 orders of magnitude per decade. Something that is absurdly wasteful now could well be economically reasonable very soon.