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The V8 Myth: Why JavaScript is not a Worthy Competitor

blogs.adobe.com

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Re: The V8 Myth: Why JavaScript is not a Worthy Competitor

#11

Post by timc3 »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #10
timc3 wrote: post #2

Adobe yet again not getting it? I realize that one person does not the voice of Adobe make, but I would have thought that he would realize that Javascript is very often not used in isolation, and more often than not as part of a large suite of technologies (Databases, network infrastructure, backend code - if not JS).

I think he's talking about using Javascript in flash's tradition role, i.e web games and interactive content.

But that is the point, its gradually being ignored as there are other ways of achieving the same functionality natively.

Personally I deal a lot with Video on the web, and although I have a Flash player my main body of development is in native implementations and transcoding profiles for Ogg, WebM and using x264 for preview.

Re: The V8 Myth: Why JavaScript is not a Worthy Competitor

#12

Post by kls »

dmethvin wrote: post #4
tommorris wrote: post #3

The Web: You are indeed brave, Sir Knight, but the fight is mine. Adobe: Oh, had enough, eh? The Web: Look, you stupid bastard. You've got no arms left. Adobe: Yes, I have. The Web: Look! Adobe: Just a flesh wound. The Web: What are you going to do, bleed on me? Adobe: Oh. Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to you. I'll bite your legs off!

Upvoted not for the humor, but for the aptness of the analogy. JavaScript is universal and free. If Adobe can create a sort-of-compatible environment that allows certain classes of apps like games to run better, great for them. Perhaps their marketing can be, "If JavaScript isn't fast enough, we've got you covered." At least it's not Dart!

It really is appropriate. I love how we keep getting told by guys that are not writing large apps in dynamic languages, that we can't write large apps in dynamic languages meanwhile guys like me are out there building some of the largest code bases in the world with JavaScript. And when it works and we release something revolutionary to the world, they tell us after the fact that it is not going to work. AMD and module dependencies have done far more for advancing building large JavaScript applications than most of these other cures.

Re: The V8 Myth: Why JavaScript is not a Worthy Competitor

#14

Post by mef »

Yes, a typed language has a speed advantage over an untyped language, and if the argument is "which language executes faster", ActionScript will win. But this post declares that JavaScript is not a "worthy competitor" to ActionScript, completely ignoring all the advantages JavaScript has that explain why its usage eclipses that of ActionScript.

Re: The V8 Myth: Why JavaScript is not a Worthy Competitor

#15

Post by pnathan »

kls wrote: post #12
dmethvin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upvoted not for the humor, but for the aptness of the analogy. JavaScript is universal and free. If Adobe can create a sort-of-compatible environment that allows certain classes of apps like games to run better, great for them. Perhaps their marketing can be, "If JavaScript isn't fast enough, we've got you covered." At least it's not Dart!

It really is appropriate. I love how we keep getting told by guys that are not writing large apps in dynamic languages, that we can't write large apps in dynamic languages meanwhile guys like me are out there building some of the largest code bases in the world with JavaScript. And when it works and we release something revolutionary to the world, they tell us after the fact that it is not going to work. AMD and modu…

"building some of the largest code bases in the world with JavaScript" You have over 100 MLoc?

Re: The V8 Myth: Why JavaScript is not a Worthy Competitor

#16

Post by voidr »

Pointless article, JS is not competing with ActionScript in the way that the author compares it.

Most of the time your app will probably be slow because of the DOM interactions, not because of your JavaScript, most time is usually spent in the rendering and fetching stuff from the network.

To give a better viewpoint: You won't write a database engine in Ruby or PHP, you will write it in C, C++, Java, but you will use PHP/Ruby to interact with it.

We have low level programming and high level programming for these distinct purposes. I am sure that if you won't write something in JavaScript you will probably not write it in ActionScript either.

Re: The V8 Myth: Why JavaScript is not a Worthy Competitor

#17

Post by Ctech237 »

I think this has to do with large companies resenting the fact open source developers spend their time making a free eco system better instead of improving their own frameworks for free.

I understand that JavaScript has its limitations, and Google tried to address this with their own language Dart. But this boils down to, you have a 100 billion dollar company serving 1 billion searches a day so you have different scalability issues than I do. But that’s not my problem. With the current technologies like Node, MongoDB, Reids, etc… I can build a 1 billion dollar startup without the same scalability issues that a 100 billion dollar company has.

I would be quite happy to have a these scalability issues once I have a 100 billion dollar company then it will be my problem. But until then, getting a start-up up and running is ridiculously hard, the last thing I need is companies generating truckloads of cash putting their development issues on to open source developers.

Re: The V8 Myth: Why JavaScript is not a Worthy Competitor

#18

Post by blago »

Disappointingly trivial post:

1) I don't know a single person that would seriously argue that dynamically typed languages can perform better than their statically typed cousins.

2) As we all know, programming is the art of making tradeoff. One common pair is ease of writing vs. performance...

3) I think Adobe should be more worried about making a flash player/plugin I can't use to warm my hands by playing video after I come back from lunch.

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