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JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

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Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#11

Post by onion2k »

rplst8 wrote: post #2

I'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...

Poorly written websites can bring a desktop PC to its knees, but so can a poorly written native application. That isn't an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications. And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn't going to take your computer down that badly.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#14

Post by aikah »

doublerebel wrote: post #4

Linux 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…

> Linux is more successful on the desktop than it's ever been, and Gnome is largely powered by JavaScript.

You mean gjs which is a poor javascript runtime. And Gnome is largely powered by C more than javascript. You may use javascript because Gobject-introspection which is also available for perl and python.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#15

Post by contextfree »

n00b101 wrote: post #7
dismantlethesun wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

I'm not sure. All the browser APIs will still use the JS object model. If we look at the situation on the JVM or CLR, it seems like languages specifically designed for those object models (even if adapted from other languages) have been more successful than attempts to directly port existing languages. e.g., Scala, Clojure, F# or Powershell vs. Jython, JRuby, C++/CLI or IronPython.

My bet would be that languages specifically designed for the JS ecosystem (whether JS itself or something like CoffeeScript or TypeScript) will continue to be the most popular for writing most of an app, with some apps dropping down to C or C++ or Rust compiled to wasm for a subset of performance-critical code.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#16

Post by aikah »

onion2k wrote: post #11
rplst8 wrote: post #2

I'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...

Poorly written websites can bring a desktop PC to its knees, but so can a poorly written native application. That isn't an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications. And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn't going to take your computer down that…

> That isn't an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications

The difference is there is very little room for optimisation in most javascript runtimes. They don't support multi-threading and the memory is impossible to manage. "Lower" level languages always allow better performance tweaking when necessary. Javascript allows next to none. You can't tell javascript :"Give me an array of 10 elements", or "give me a integer of that length". So no "headroom" for performances with Javascript.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#17

Post by catnaroek »

onion2k wrote: post #11
rplst8 wrote: post #2

I'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...

Poorly written websites can bring a desktop PC to its knees, but so can a poorly written native application. That isn't an argument against leveraging web technology so much as an argument in favour of well written applications. And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn't going to take your computer down that…

> Poorly written websites can bring a desktop PC to its knees, but so can a poorly written native application.

Even well-written Web applications tend to use more system resources than their well-written desktop counterparts. A few days ago, I was surprised to find that Chromium was using 6 GB of RAM, while all other processes combined (including three Emacs instances, running fancy modes) were using just 1GB. And, no, I wasn't playing browser games or doing anything fancy in Chromium: just viewing text and images.

> And at least with a chromeless-browser-pretending-to-be-application you have the protection of the browser process sandbox so an app that goes awry isn't going to take your computer down that badly.

It would be much better to use programs that don't need to run in a sandbox in the first place. (To be fair, OS-enforced memory protection can be considered a kind of sandboxing too.)

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#18

Post by jaquers »

rplst8 wrote: post #2

I'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 disagreement about memory usage, except to say that [some web sites] are usually either poorly or unethically coded. I was on theverge.com yesterday, wondering why the network indicator was going crazy on a blog post. Pull up dev tools and it's ad code downloading megs worth of data, endlessly. Whether that's on theverge, or bad actor for ad code; I don't know or care - but when people talk about bad websites that's usually the primary example in my experience.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#19

Post by zeppelin101 »

ndepoel wrote: post #13

JavaScript didn't "conquer" anything. It was just one of the first languages around when the web was still in its infancy, and simply never went away.

Javascript became far more significant than what it used to be. We can largely thank Microsoft (AJAX) and Google (V8) for that.

Re: JavaScript Conquered the Web, Now It’s Taking Over the Desktop

#20

Post by gpderetta »

doublerebel wrote: post #4

Linux 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…

Anecdote time: after I did a distupgrade of my kubuntu desktop to the next kubuntu release, kwin kept crashing for some reason, probably due to a botched package update. After attaching gdb to the dying process I found out that it was dying inside a javascript interpreter.

Not wanting to know WTF a JS interpreter was doing inside the window manager, I wiped kubuntu, installed plain debian and now I'm happily running xfce on my desktop too.

Of course now someone will tell me that xfce has also been similarly infected...

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