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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

#21

Post by tomjen3 »

funkah wrote: post #9

Oh, I guess all the JS devs who work in the language every day didn't get the memo. But in all seriousness, who couldn't have guessed that there would be some Flash/Actionscript dead-enders? Incredibly unsurprising that this was posted on adobe dot com.

I work with Javascript everyday.

And I hate it. It is broken as a language (var hoisting, this can mean pretty much whatever you want it to, no types, not even a good damm s32int).

But it works on all platforms and so it will always beat Flash.

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

#23

Post by jmileham »

I'm not an ActionScript hero, so I can't really weigh in on its awesomeness, but the fact that they rewrote it three times and ultimately ended up with a solid language is to be applauded but not surprising. If you were to put the perfect language and smartest compiler into (what I percieve to be) a somewhat kludgy proprietary environment like Adobe's present toolchain, that doesn't strike me as a recipe for win, though. If I'm wrong about the state of affairs there, feel free to educate me.

Dusting off the age-old interpreted vs. precompiled fight as a closing argument strikes me as a little weak as well. If raw runtime performance and the benefits of static typing were the ultimate measure of a language's utility, nobody would write Ruby.

The author would probably be wise to read up on disruptive innovation. The biggest mistake an incumbent can make is to overestimate the importance of the disruptor's weaknesses while the disruptor is busy eating the incumbent's lunch.

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

#24

Post by randomdata »

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.

I was going to comment, if Tamarin is so great, why haven't you integrated it into the browsers? But in doing my due diligence, I realized that Adobe did give the code to Mozilla for exactly that.

So this is actually about the language beyond Flash.

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

#25

Post by astrodust »

vessenes wrote: post #7

At best, this reeks of like 2000-era Microsoft, "Why does everybody get so excited about Javascript still? ActionScript is way better! Duh!" As far as actual points in the fine article -- a test using some sort of strongly typed data on an unreleased actionscript vm ran three times faster than v8 running similar code. I'm not shocked at all, and think Javascript could badly use at the least some type hinting, persona…

This is what I'm having trouble believing. If ActionScript can be "compiled to death", where in this case "compiled" means "to bytecode" then presumably the same thing could happen to JavaScript.

In the V8 environment it should be possible to aggressively optimize the code in question with various command line options. Where is -O5?

The real problem is a lack of an open-standard for JavaScript bytecode. Being able to serve "pre-compiled" JavaScript would go a long way towards improving performance.

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

#26

Post by kls »

pnathan wrote: post #15
kls wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You are focusing on the wrong part of the conjecture, the point is, large code bases are being written in JavaScript everyday. Yet, People with the position like the author continue to argue that it can't happen, despite the evidence being readily available.

I don't want to dodge your question thought, the answer is yes I have worked on some JavaScript code bases that are several MLoc. Which I would consider for conjecture sake to rank in the largest. what constitutes that bar is up for debate whether they are the top 50 or 500th or 5000th largest, but I do feel that they qualify as large code bases. Which sufficed for the point I was making.

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

#27

Post by pangram »

vessenes wrote: post #7

At best, this reeks of like 2000-era Microsoft, "Why does everybody get so excited about Javascript still? ActionScript is way better! Duh!" As far as actual points in the fine article -- a test using some sort of strongly typed data on an unreleased actionscript vm ran three times faster than v8 running similar code. I'm not shocked at all, and think Javascript could badly use at the least some type hinting, persona…

Out of interest, is there anything you can share about the particulars of your application? We did the same Flash vs. HTML5 analysis in the context of Facebook games, but in our experiments it looked like Flash still won handily in terms of performance.
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