> a small 40MB iOS app
What a sad, sad world we find ourselves to live in.
Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
11–20 of 231 posts
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#12I don't think so. Browsers will catch up with what developers want. We have seen that with ActiveX, Flash, Java applets, jQuery etc. Every time tech was needed because "The browser alone is not good enough" the browser became better and made the additional tech obsolete.
> Browsers will catch up with what developers want.
Developers want everything from JavaScript to C++, Python and Haskell. There's no way a browser can specifically address all what developers want. Therefore browsers should become better virtual machines.
Edit: yup, WASM is a good start.
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#13Whilst I am in favour of the optimisation of resources (and use these sources) we are willingly moving the "View Source" model to for profit entities like github.
In the way the internet has evolved we really should look hard it the elephant in the room: the DOM is for documents - not for interfaces.
IMHO optimisation for javascript is just a short term fad (hopefully) and browsers will adopt a more open approach to interface building. This should lead to "View source" on an open standard for interface building - which I think React comes close to. I know there are projects around that attempt this, but I am not aware of any real successes - at least in the same way React has grown.
The elegance of HTML has been superseded now, because interfaces are rich and packed with features. The DOM design is lacking and slow because of legacy support.
If the whole community effort was spent creating a better UI/UX standard (a standard web front end) - compilers would have no business case and i'm not sure they ever should.
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#14"The trend started by minifiers like UglifyJS and continued by transpilers like Babel will only accelerate." Those were predated by Closure Compiler, which was started with Gmail, and Closure Compiler in some ways still doesn't have an equal. Besides being a fully optimizing compiler, it also has a module system for code splitting, and optimization passes designed to move code at the method/property level from initia…
The Closure Compiler is the only reason I have Java installed, it's that good.
And IMHO, a lot of the bloated JS projects nowadays would really profit from its dead code removal...
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#15> When it comes to eking performance out of hand-authored JavaScript and accompanying runtime libraries, we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.
Are you saying that web developers are writing the best code that they can? That future gains are going to come from more advanced js preprocessors instead of more informed developers? I strongly disagree that we have reached any sort of diminishing returns when it comes to the quality of hand written code.
> Between WebAssembly, SharedArrayBuffer and Atomics, and maybe even threads in JavaScript, the building blocks for the next generation of web applications are falling into place.
Read the specs for one of these. Read the specs for any of these. Read the specs for js functions you call every day, and image what the native implementation looks like. The web will never approach native performance because w3 has been sabotaging it for a decade.
> time to learn how compilers work.
I think the author would benefit from learning about how web frameworks work, or perhaps how web specs mandate that your browser works.
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#16I don't think so. Browsers will catch up with what developers want. We have seen that with ActiveX, Flash, Java applets, jQuery etc. Every time tech was needed because "The browser alone is not good enough" the browser became better and made the additional tech obsolete.
I think the effort going into browsers is a double-edged sword. It's nice that we've got so much work going on, pushing new standards, etc. but it's also making browsers more bloated and making it less viable to bring out new browsers.
As more stuff gets done in Javascript, and Javascript gains more APIs, browsers like Lynx, Dillo, Netsurf, and umpteen yet-to-be-written ones are becoming less able to browse the Web. Likewise, the effort required to "upgrade" them would be massive.
I think a consolidation of features would alleviate the situation a little: have a small "foundation" of required tech, e.g. a subset of JS (or WebAssembly) with few primitives or APIs, and have the browser pull in polyfills for everything else, including interpreters for fuller, newer JS standards, etc. If a browser is graphical, it could provide a bitmap-blitting primitive, and use polyfills for CSS, fonts, layout, etc.
The Chromes and Firefoxes of the world could ignore the polyfills and keep going with their highly-tuned native implementations of these things, but it would prevent "kicking the ladder away" from everyone else.
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#17"The trend started by minifiers like UglifyJS and continued by transpilers like Babel will only accelerate." Those were predated by Closure Compiler, which was started with Gmail, and Closure Compiler in some ways still doesn't have an equal. Besides being a fully optimizing compiler, it also has a module system for code splitting, and optimization passes designed to move code at the method/property level from initia…
This was also predated by the Opa "framework" which is indeed a compiler for the web platform, announced in 2009 and released a bit later.
At the time, people didn't want to hear about a new language so we had to hide behind a framework. But one of the ideas was that there is no sense in bundling libraries at runtime instead of generating exactly the application code that should run.
Cf. http://opalang.org (disclaimer: I was the project creator)
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#18I don't think so. Browsers will catch up with what developers want. We have seen that with ActiveX, Flash, Java applets, jQuery etc. Every time tech was needed because "The browser alone is not good enough" the browser became better and made the additional tech obsolete.
> Browsers will catch up with what developers want. Developers want everything from JavaScript to C++, Python and Haskell. There's no way a browser can specifically address all what developers want. Therefore browsers should become better virtual machines. Edit: yup, WASM is a good start.
Sounds like you need to read up just a little bit on Web Assembly which is compiled from anything including C, C++, Rust and just about any language. Including Python and others. Web Assembly will make syntax irrelevant for web scripting and JavaScript entirely optional depending on how much WebASM is allowed to access.
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#19"The trend started by minifiers like UglifyJS and continued by transpilers like Babel will only accelerate." Those were predated by Closure Compiler, which was started with Gmail, and Closure Compiler in some ways still doesn't have an equal. Besides being a fully optimizing compiler, it also has a module system for code splitting, and optimization passes designed to move code at the method/property level from initia…
In the beginning there was GWT. But along with Java, GWT has a steep learning curve so its appeal is limited.
Re: Web frameworks are transforming from runtime libraries into optimizing compilers
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Browsers will catch up with what developers want. Developers want everything from JavaScript to C++, Python and Haskell. There's no way a browser can specifically address all what developers want. Therefore browsers should become better virtual machines. Edit: yup, WASM is a good start.
Sounds like you need to read up just a little bit on Web Assembly which is compiled from anything including C, C++, Rust and just about any language. Including Python and others. Web Assembly will make syntax irrelevant for web scripting and JavaScript entirely optional depending on how much WebASM is allowed to access.
As soon as Webassembly ships garbage collection and the authors are willed to create a Wasm backend for the given language.