Regardless of the content, this is one of my most favourite talks ever, especially in the delivery aspect. It served me as an inspiration for quite some time when I had to present anything to a wide audience.
The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
31–40 of 144 posts
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#32JS became a compilation target (and it really did), and back then in the video it was asm.js (that's been deprecated, hasn't it?), but then WebAssembly came along... Seeing it actually being implemented and running natively, it seems his prediction was accurate. I mainly use TypeScript myself, and now with Electron, web technologies are wrapped into desktop apps, so web syntax has even entered computer programs. Peop…
> but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once. Flutter exists too, and supports iOS and Android in addition to the desktop OSes. The dev time is pretty fast too imo. That said, idk how the performance compares to Electron or Native apps. As a small team, optimizing for "actually getting the thing shipped" is so much better than optimizing for speed anyway.
In my experience performance is about the same as native on mobile. On desktop I cannot compare as I thankfully never had to make cross platform desktop apps using native platform SDKs, but Flutter is doing fine. I am a working on a non trivial desktop app, and I am pretty happy about it.
Hopefully the desktop story is going improve as Canonical is now leading the Flutter desktop side.
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#33JS became a compilation target (and it really did), and back then in the video it was asm.js (that's been deprecated, hasn't it?), but then WebAssembly came along... Seeing it actually being implemented and running natively, it seems his prediction was accurate. I mainly use TypeScript myself, and now with Electron, web technologies are wrapped into desktop apps, so web syntax has even entered computer programs. Peop…
JavaScript is the new assembler layer so to say. Every compiler as per definition translates human readable code into machine language. The benefit of JavaScript is, that, after Google really pushed it to its limit with V8 and of course NodeJS made it a backend dream, that it is ubiquitous and once written usable everywhere, much kinda like PDF. Its versatility gave it the advantage over WebAssembly to this day, beca…
> Every compiler as per definition translates human readable code into machine language.
This is a pedantic point, but that's not really what the definition of compiler is as much as a common understanding of it. By definition, it just translates one language into another, and a human-readable to human-readable translation is still a compiler ("transpiler" is more slang than actual formal terminology).
This might just be one of those already lost battles, but like "crypto" being used to mean "digital money" rather than "cryptography", I feel like the new terminology is weird and unnecessary, so it's something I have trouble adapting to even though I rationally know that usage evolves over time and sometimes the words I like less will become the norm.
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#34"YavaScript" made me smile.
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Flutter exists too, and supports iOS and Android in addition to the desktop OSes. The dev time is pretty fast too imo. Flutter is a joke on the web, and it consumes as much as Electron, sometimes worse, on a desktop.
You got sources to back this up, or is this just you're opinion?
Regarding the "joke on the web", there's plenty of HN threads about Flutter where you will see this sentiment, not only about performance, also about UX (e.g. text rendering, selection, scrolling...).
I'm not sure if the web render engine has gotten better since then, and am too lazy to look up the links rn, but threads should be easy to find using HN search.
Still seems like a common source language + GUI toolkit that targets the web platform and various native platforms (mainly Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and desktop Linux of course) without significant overhead has not been achieved yet. And it's questionable whether it's possible, given the special requirements (and capabilities) of the web platform and the different native platform.
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#36JS became a compilation target (and it really did), and back then in the video it was asm.js (that's been deprecated, hasn't it?), but then WebAssembly came along... Seeing it actually being implemented and running natively, it seems his prediction was accurate. I mainly use TypeScript myself, and now with Electron, web technologies are wrapped into desktop apps, so web syntax has even entered computer programs. Peop…
> People say Electron is heavy and not great, but it's also the fastest way to support Mac, Windows, and Linux all at once Websites have actually long been a great cross-platform mechanism Just a shame about the giant browser you have to load first
To be fair, implementing something like the Spotify client does require a web app, not "just" a web site.
But even document rendering with light scripting is not trivial so yeah, the required browser is the bottleneck.
I always wonder (layman question): couldn't native Electron apps (and similar technologies) save a great deal of RAM by using the same sandboxing model for apps that browsers use for tabs, instead of fully-fledged instances?
Was that an idea that Tauri also tries to implement, or am I remembering this wrongly?
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#37I skim though it and saw they had something javascript asm.js in kernel.
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#38JS became a compilation target (and it really did), and back then in the video it was asm.js (that's been deprecated, hasn't it?), but then WebAssembly came along... Seeing it actually being implemented and running natively, it seems his prediction was accurate. I mainly use TypeScript myself, and now with Electron, web technologies are wrapped into desktop apps, so web syntax has even entered computer programs. Peop…
Within the video's story, they removed virtual memory and memory protection because the JIT was good enough. Nothing like that has happened at all.
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#39interpreted languages carry a lot more context than compiled ones. Sandboxed compiled languages don’t have the context baggage, but come with other parts of the brain dead.
I don't think Javascript is still interpreted though?
Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014)
#40I love(?) that he absolutely predicted a global disaster between 2020-2025, he just got the wrong type. Which is very JavaScript.
He was pretty close to being NaN% correct.