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Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

benediktmeurer.de

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Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#31

Post by fnordsensei »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #30
debaserab2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's maybe fair to say it's the most important technology when it comes to web development. The software engineering world is much bigger than just web development, though.

JavaScript is important in: * Web Development is obvious, sure * Cross platform app development: React Native, NativeScript, Electron, nw.js, and others are extremely powerful, arguably among the best cross platform solutions, and all are gaining in popularity * Server development. NodeJS is hard to ignore because it's fast, easy to develop in, and has the amazing (if sometimes frustrating) NPM ecosystem. Software en…

I guess it comes down to what you mean by "important". I for one hope that airplanes, power plants and medical machinery are all programmed with something else.

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#32

Post by hoschicz »

kalleboo wrote: post #5

I apologize if this is an uninformed question, but are there any popular browser benchmarks out there? I'm sure that JS benchmarks are useful to browser developers and those who want JS to be the next general application platform, but as a user, I'm currently sticking to Safari since things like battery life and scrolling performance on mainly document-oriented pages are still more important to me.

the author mentions speedometer. It tests everything a browser needs to load and use a web app - styling, DOM parsing, JS...

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#33

Post by lttlrck »

fnordsensei wrote: post #31
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is important in: * Web Development is obvious, sure * Cross platform app development: React Native, NativeScript, Electron, nw.js, and others are extremely powerful, arguably among the best cross platform solutions, and all are gaining in popularity * Server development. NodeJS is hard to ignore because it's fast, easy to develop in, and has the amazing (if sometimes frustrating) NPM ecosystem. Software en…

I guess it comes down to what you mean by "important". I for one hope that airplanes, power plants and medical machinery are all programmed with something else.

If the author had said the same thing about that would have been wrong too...

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#34

Post by Skunkleton »

lttlrck wrote: post #33
fnordsensei wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it comes down to what you mean by "important". I for one hope that airplanes, power plants and medical machinery are all programmed with something else.

If the author had said the same thing about that would have been wrong too...

It sure would have been.

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#35

Post by debaserab2 »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #30
debaserab2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's maybe fair to say it's the most important technology when it comes to web development. The software engineering world is much bigger than just web development, though.

JavaScript is important in: * Web Development is obvious, sure * Cross platform app development: React Native, NativeScript, Electron, nw.js, and others are extremely powerful, arguably among the best cross platform solutions, and all are gaining in popularity * Server development. NodeJS is hard to ignore because it's fast, easy to develop in, and has the amazing (if sometimes frustrating) NPM ecosystem. Software en…

Thats still a fraction of the overall software engineering world. There's a lot more in the world than websites and phone apps that need code to run.

That's not taking away from its importance, that's putting it into perspective. I'm not an anti-javascript snob either (I'm not sure what that actually means), I just think it's a bit hyperbolic to call javascript the most important thing happening in software engineering right now when we're solving much bigger global problems than that right now with technology.

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#36

Post by debaserab2 »

lttlrck wrote: post #33
fnordsensei wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it comes down to what you mean by "important". I for one hope that airplanes, power plants and medical machinery are all programmed with something else.

If the author had said the same thing about that would have been wrong too...

correct

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#37

Post by fnordsensei »

lttlrck wrote: post #33
fnordsensei wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it comes down to what you mean by "important". I for one hope that airplanes, power plants and medical machinery are all programmed with something else.

If the author had said the same thing about that would have been wrong too...

Agreed.

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#38

Post by paulddraper »

BlackFingolfin wrote: post #2

"It is probably fair to say that JavaScript is the most important technology these days when it comes to software engineering." Uhh ... no?

Gosh, how do you even judge that....

If JS is super important, does that make C++ (the most common implementation language for JS runtimes) super-duper important?

Willing to bet $100 that there are more projects developing with Git than JS.

---

Actually wait...I GOT IT: the most important technology these days when it comes to software engineering is the microprocessor.

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#39

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

debaserab2 wrote: post #35
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is important in: * Web Development is obvious, sure * Cross platform app development: React Native, NativeScript, Electron, nw.js, and others are extremely powerful, arguably among the best cross platform solutions, and all are gaining in popularity * Server development. NodeJS is hard to ignore because it's fast, easy to develop in, and has the amazing (if sometimes frustrating) NPM ecosystem. Software en…

Thats still a fraction of the overall software engineering world. There's a lot more in the world than websites and phone apps that need code to run. That's not taking away from its importance, that's putting it into perspective. I'm not an anti-javascript snob either (I'm not sure what that actually means), I just think it's a bit hyperbolic to call javascript the most important thing happening in software engineeri…

> I'm not an anti-javascript snob either (I'm not sure what that actually means),

Having been one, and having argued with several, it generally means:

* Looking at how JavaScript started vs. where it is now.

* Complaining about the ways that the backward compatibility requirements of the language can lead to obscure bugs, e.g., auto-coercion on "==" comparisons can end up with surprising and sometimes bug-causing results

and, importantly

* Ignoring all of the best-practice advice to use linters (eslint, tslint) that, in a deterministic manner, prevent you from writing code that contains any of the above bugs.

TypeScript also solves 95% of the major JavaScript complaints.

>There's a lot more in the world than websites and phone apps that need code to run.

and

>I just think it's a bit hyperbolic to call javascript the most important thing happening in software engineering right now when we're solving much bigger global problems than that right now with technology.

If you count all of the code to run apps, servers, and web clients, I think you do hit the majority of code out there, at least if you're counting the number of developers working on it. I think you would hit a majority just with web client side. It seems like everyone and their sister does web development. With all three domains it seems trivial to hit 50%, and I think 80% is still a reasonable estimate. A quick search finds no statistics on this, though. :|

Whether there are "bigger global problems" that are being solved elsewhere isn't really relevant. It's entirely reasonable to say that something is highly important to "software engineering" if it has relevance to more than 50% of software engineers.

Re: Traditional JavaScript benchmarks

#40

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

fnordsensei wrote: post #31
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JavaScript is important in: * Web Development is obvious, sure * Cross platform app development: React Native, NativeScript, Electron, nw.js, and others are extremely powerful, arguably among the best cross platform solutions, and all are gaining in popularity * Server development. NodeJS is hard to ignore because it's fast, easy to develop in, and has the amazing (if sometimes frustrating) NPM ecosystem. Software en…

I guess it comes down to what you mean by "important". I for one hope that airplanes, power plants and medical machinery are all programmed with something else.

I never claimed that JavaScript was or should be used in any of the above. Just that it's "important in software engineering", by which I mean it's used or usable by people in 80% of the actual jobs in "software engineering."

I'd probably prefer to see a language like Go or Rust in critical systems. Self driving cars come to mind as well, but probably anything IoT or otherwise infrastructure related. But I think those jobs, all together, are a minority of programming positions.

I hope so, anyway, because I don't actually believe there are enough smart developers to work on critical systems if it's anything like half or more of the software engineering population. Most developers pretty well suck.

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