8 ms·

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 bri

by rplst8 10y ago

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-of-javascript https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

dismantlethesun 10y ago
It is pretty excessive, but maybe web assembly would find a real home in making applications that do well on both native and web.
- n00b101 10y ago
  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.
  - gjolund 10y ago
    Agreed, Im so tired of being forced to write js.
  - contextfree 10y ago
    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.
    - vidarh 10y ago
      I'm sure there'll be a mix. But consider things like Opal (Ruby => javascript), and it seems like there's at least some people who very much want to be able to work in a single language, but for that language to not be javascript... I'm sure once webassembly is ready, that'll at least get more popular.
  - Udik 10y ago
    I guess you tend to reuse the technologies you're familiar with, especially when they are very well proven for solving a very complicated problem that requires a lot of expertise (I'm talking about fancy UIs, of course). Which is also why I think the emphasis on JS is wrong: the main selling point of these technologies is NOT javascript, is HTML5/ CSS. Javascript is just a (very handy indeed) scripting language like any other: frankly the logic and requirements of most applications around are not complex enough to justify the usage of anything more solid or complicated than that. Just today I was contacted by a former colleague, a Java developer, asking advice on using Electron to develop a quick desktop application. On the other hand, there is a long list of languages that transpile to javascript. So where are the masses of serious C#/ Java/ <pick-your-language> developers using transpilers to write the logic of their web applications?
    - n00b101 10y ago
      So where are the masses of serious C#/ Java/ <pick-your-language> developers using transpilers to write the logic of their web applications? I think it is catching on with C++ game developers, who want to be able to run the same codebase natively or in the web browser. The Unity 3D game engine has built-in support for this using WebGL, for example. I don't know if CLR or JVM languages have been successfully transpiled to the browser using asm.js / WebAssembly (it wouldn't be very efficient at all, so I doubt that will ever be popular).
raquo 10y ago
No one likes that, but 1) HTML/CSS/JS is sill the only truly cross-platform (mac/windows/linux/web/ios/android/etc.) UI platform/ecosystem in 2016, and it will probably stay that way in the foreseeable future because OS makers love their walled gardens. 2) An app's memory efficiency is not a top 10 priority of an average solo-or-small-team developer's concerns, because that's not what most users pay for. Electron/NW.js apps will only become more common, so I hope things will improve with asm.js/webassembly/etc.
- fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
  On point (1) you've kind of loaded the comparison by including web in that list...
  - raquo 10y ago
    It's a common business scenario: start out as a web app, then as business picks up let's start providing native apps. Or the other way: start out with a native app on the platform we most care about + a web app for "access from anywhere".
- gr3yh47 10y ago
  Python would like a word with you about point 1)
  - corv 10y ago
    Python on iOS?
    - nodja 10y ago
      It's not pretty but: https://kivy.org/docs/guide/packaging-ios.html https://kivy.org/docs/guide/packaging-ios.html
      - corv 10y ago
        Interesting
catnaroek 10y ago
Too much wishful thinking during the second half of the talk, though. Also, while fancy runtime systems can improve the performance of dynamic[0] languages, it doesn't come for free: the price to be paid is the loss of elegance. For instance, a JIT compiler could inline a virtual method that seems not to be overridden anywhere, but if later on it turns out that the virtual method was overridden somewhere, the “optimization” has to be undone. How can anyone in their right mind trust a language that requires such dirty implementation tricks to achieve decent performance? [0] By which I mean “less amenable to static analysis”, regardless of whether the language has a static type system. For instance, Java and C# are dynamic languages in this sense.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  > How can anyone in their right mind trust a language that requires such dirty implementation tricks to achieve decent performance? Isn't this a rather broad brush with which to paint all JIT language implementations, including Java, C#, and, say, PyPy?
  - catnaroek 10y ago
    Could you name a JIT compiler that doesn't do this kind of thing, yet offers performance comparable to AOT-compiled languages? (FWIW, I'm not saying it's impossible. It's perfectly possible, but you'd need a source language that offers much better static guarantees than the typical language that a JIT compiler is written for.) --- Sorry, can't reply to you directly, because “I'm submitting too fast”. So my reply goes here: > for the simple reason that type systems cannot capture all relevant runtime context. Type checking isn't the only kind of static analysis out there. And there's no need to use statistics to optimize anything at runtime when your ahead-of-time compilation step already emits optimal target machine code. > Java is a good example here, since it's strongly statically typed. Java is as dynamically typed as it gets: `instanceof`, downcasts and reflection, all conspire to reduce the usefulness of static type information to zero. > By your reckoning, all greedy optimizations that CPUs do like branch prediction and prefetching are also similarly 'inelegant', because they can be wrong and require rolling back. Yes, indeed. It's more elegant to know beforehand what exactly you have to do, and then do just that and nothing else.
wpietri 10y ago
I feel your pain. My first computer had 4K of RAM; my second had 48K; my third, 640K. I learned to work small. It pains me to see the equivalent of Hello World taking up untold MB. But when I think about software as a business rather than an art, I have to concede that it's a very rare circumstance where RAM efficiency matters as much as I'd like. Note the way the cost of memory has declined: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm Watches now have 100,000 times the RAM that I started with. Costs are dropping by 1-2 orders of magnitude per decade. Something that is absurdly wasteful now could well be economically reasonable very soon.
- vidarh 10y ago
  Memory isn't the issue to me. Latency is. Most of the applications I work with today do a lot, that's true, but their UI latency is often worse than it was on my 7.16Mz M68000 Amiga 500, and other things as well are just slow. I've mentioned here several times in the past that on my laptop I can "boot" Linux-hosted AROS (so the problem is not the Linux kernel, nor X) with a custom startup script to boot it straight into a full featured, scriptable text editor in less time than it takes to start Emacs. I'm sure it's possible to tune my Emacs setup (for example, I found out by a fluke, that the default Emacs setup on debian will wait for a DNS request to complete or time out before it starts - break your DNS setup and Emacs will hang for ages) or pick another editor (many of the other ones I've tried are either just as slow or feature-limited compared to the Amiga editor in question - FrexxEd, co-written by the same guy that started curl), but the point is that we've come to accept the kind of slow startup and UI latency that was unacceptable back then. E.g. people spent weeks tuning and trimming AmigaOS commands to make them the smallest possible so we could make as many of them as possible RAM resident to avoid the tiny fractions of a second it'd take the load-time linker to load them. I'm happy we don't need to think that much about the RAM any more. But we do need to think about the latency. There's the attitude that we should just throw servers at this instead of developer time. That's fine when you can compensate by e.g. throwing more RAM in and/or a program is run relatively rarely or where paying for a beefier server in some data centre can achieve the same performance. But it's not true when latency grows into user noticeable levels because you can't get high enough single-core performance, and that program is run a lot.
onion2k 10y ago
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.
- aikah 10y ago
  > 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.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    > the memory is impossible to manage. Nonsense. There are plenty of strategies for managing memory efficiently in JavaScript. Yes you can't do a C++ level of allocation, decallocation, etc but you most certainly can manage the amount of memory your code uses.
  - jaquers 10y ago
    I think the spirit of the argument is that if you have requirements for heavy computation such that you need multithreading + low level memory management, then you probably shouldn't use this. Use the right tool for the job. This is just one of them. Plus there are alternatives to threads. Look at the state of Atom or VSCode. Much progress has been made in terms of perf and these are not trivial applications.
    - dilann 10y ago
      > Use the right tool for the job That's a funny argument in a thread about js. Js has started as a small language to do scripting on the pages, now they are sticking it everywhere.
jaquers 10y ago
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.
segmondy 10y ago
See the spotify client, popcorn time, visual studio code. these are javascript. They run great.
- _prototype_ 10y ago
  Also the Slack web client
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Have you checked how much memory they use? I know we have 8-core laptops with 16 gigs of RAM, but, still, it's excessive.
  - segmondy 10y ago
    Don't have an 8 core, or 16 gigs of ram. I'm talking about my desktop. I have a 4 core i5 from 2013. Spotify has 173M in res. Visual studio code with 10 files open has 99M in res. I have firefox open with about 125 tabs open, 6 terminal windows, 2 pdf files open, VLC open but not playing, IRC in about 15 channels. Load average is 0.60. Memory load across all CPU's about 10%. 8gigs used out of 12gigs of ram. With firefox using 5.1 gigs.
  - freyr 10y ago
    Any idea why the memory usage is so high? Is it related to the Electron/Chromium platform, or bad application design?
    - rbanffy 10y ago
      Would need to check, but my bet is caching of partially rendered HTML as bitmaps, as well as a full JavaScript JIT environment. It's just a high footprint enironment.

by rplst8 10y ago

dismantlethesun 10y ago

It is pretty excessive, but maybe web assembly would find a real home in making applications that do well on both native and web.

n00b101 10y ago
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.
- gjolund 10y ago
  Agreed, Im so tired of being forced to write js.
- contextfree 10y ago
  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.
  - vidarh 10y ago
    I'm sure there'll be a mix. But consider things like Opal (Ruby => javascript), and it seems like there's at least some people who very much want to be able to work in a single language, but for that language to not be javascript... I'm sure once webassembly is ready, that'll at least get more popular.
- Udik 10y ago
  I guess you tend to reuse the technologies you're familiar with, especially when they are very well proven for solving a very complicated problem that requires a lot of expertise (I'm talking about fancy UIs, of course). Which is also why I think the emphasis on JS is wrong: the main selling point of these technologies is NOT javascript, is HTML5/ CSS. Javascript is just a (very handy indeed) scripting language like any other: frankly the logic and requirements of most applications around are not complex enough to justify the usage of anything more solid or complicated than that. Just today I was contacted by a former colleague, a Java developer, asking advice on using Electron to develop a quick desktop application. On the other hand, there is a long list of languages that transpile to javascript. So where are the masses of serious C#/ Java/ <pick-your-language> developers using transpilers to write the logic of their web applications?
  - n00b101 10y ago
    So where are the masses of serious C#/ Java/ <pick-your-language> developers using transpilers to write the logic of their web applications? I think it is catching on with C++ game developers, who want to be able to run the same codebase natively or in the web browser. The Unity 3D game engine has built-in support for this using WebGL, for example. I don't know if CLR or JVM languages have been successfully transpiled to the browser using asm.js / WebAssembly (it wouldn't be very efficient at all, so I doubt that will ever be popular).

raquo 10y ago

No one likes that, but 1) HTML/CSS/JS is sill the only truly cross-platform (mac/windows/linux/web/ios/android/etc.) UI platform/ecosystem in 2016, and it will probably stay that way in the foreseeable future because OS makers love their walled gardens. 2) An app's memory efficiency is not a top 10 priority of an average solo-or-small-team developer's concerns, because that's not what most users pay for. Electron/NW.js apps will only become more common, so I hope things will improve with asm.js/webassembly/etc.

fdgdasfadsf 10y ago
On point (1) you've kind of loaded the comparison by including web in that list...
- raquo 10y ago
  It's a common business scenario: start out as a web app, then as business picks up let's start providing native apps. Or the other way: start out with a native app on the platform we most care about + a web app for "access from anywhere".
gr3yh47 10y ago
Python would like a word with you about point 1)
- corv 10y ago
  Python on iOS?
  - nodja 10y ago
    It's not pretty but: https://kivy.org/docs/guide/packaging-ios.html https://kivy.org/docs/guide/packaging-ios.html
    - corv 10y ago
      Interesting

catnaroek 10y ago

Too much wishful thinking during the second half of the talk, though. Also, while fancy runtime systems can improve the performance of dynamic[0] languages, it doesn't come for free: the price to be paid is the loss of elegance. For instance, a JIT compiler could inline a virtual method that seems not to be overridden anywhere, but if later on it turns out that the virtual method was overridden somewhere, the “optimization” has to be undone. How can anyone in their right mind trust a language that requires such dirty implementation tricks to achieve decent performance? [0] By which I mean “less amenable to static analysis”, regardless of whether the language has a static type system. For instance, Java and C# are dynamic languages in this sense.

smallnamespace 10y ago
> How can anyone in their right mind trust a language that requires such dirty implementation tricks to achieve decent performance? Isn't this a rather broad brush with which to paint all JIT language implementations, including Java, C#, and, say, PyPy?
- catnaroek 10y ago
  Could you name a JIT compiler that doesn't do this kind of thing, yet offers performance comparable to AOT-compiled languages? (FWIW, I'm not saying it's impossible. It's perfectly possible, but you'd need a source language that offers much better static guarantees than the typical language that a JIT compiler is written for.) --- Sorry, can't reply to you directly, because “I'm submitting too fast”. So my reply goes here: > for the simple reason that type systems cannot capture all relevant runtime context. Type checking isn't the only kind of static analysis out there. And there's no need to use statistics to optimize anything at runtime when your ahead-of-time compilation step already emits optimal target machine code. > Java is a good example here, since it's strongly statically typed. Java is as dynamically typed as it gets: `instanceof`, downcasts and reflection, all conspire to reduce the usefulness of static type information to zero. > By your reckoning, all greedy optimizations that CPUs do like branch prediction and prefetching are also similarly 'inelegant', because they can be wrong and require rolling back. Yes, indeed. It's more elegant to know beforehand what exactly you have to do, and then do just that and nothing else.

wpietri 10y ago

I feel your pain. My first computer had 4K of RAM; my second had 48K; my third, 640K. I learned to work small. It pains me to see the equivalent of Hello World taking up untold MB. But when I think about software as a business rather than an art, I have to concede that it's a very rare circumstance where RAM efficiency matters as much as I'd like. Note the way the cost of memory has declined: http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm http://www.jcmit.com/mem2015.htm Watches now have 100,000 times the RAM that I started with. Costs are dropping by 1-2 orders of magnitude per decade. Something that is absurdly wasteful now could well be economically reasonable very soon.

vidarh 10y ago
Memory isn't the issue to me. Latency is. Most of the applications I work with today do a lot, that's true, but their UI latency is often worse than it was on my 7.16Mz M68000 Amiga 500, and other things as well are just slow. I've mentioned here several times in the past that on my laptop I can "boot" Linux-hosted AROS (so the problem is not the Linux kernel, nor X) with a custom startup script to boot it straight into a full featured, scriptable text editor in less time than it takes to start Emacs. I'm sure it's possible to tune my Emacs setup (for example, I found out by a fluke, that the default Emacs setup on debian will wait for a DNS request to complete or time out before it starts - break your DNS setup and Emacs will hang for ages) or pick another editor (many of the other ones I've tried are either just as slow or feature-limited compared to the Amiga editor in question - FrexxEd, co-written by the same guy that started curl), but the point is that we've come to accept the kind of slow startup and UI latency that was unacceptable back then. E.g. people spent weeks tuning and trimming AmigaOS commands to make them the smallest possible so we could make as many of them as possible RAM resident to avoid the tiny fractions of a second it'd take the load-time linker to load them. I'm happy we don't need to think that much about the RAM any more. But we do need to think about the latency. There's the attitude that we should just throw servers at this instead of developer time. That's fine when you can compensate by e.g. throwing more RAM in and/or a program is run relatively rarely or where paying for a beefier server in some data centre can achieve the same performance. But it's not true when latency grows into user noticeable levels because you can't get high enough single-core performance, and that program is run a lot.

onion2k 10y ago

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.

aikah 10y ago
> 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.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > the memory is impossible to manage. Nonsense. There are plenty of strategies for managing memory efficiently in JavaScript. Yes you can't do a C++ level of allocation, decallocation, etc but you most certainly can manage the amount of memory your code uses.
- jaquers 10y ago
  I think the spirit of the argument is that if you have requirements for heavy computation such that you need multithreading + low level memory management, then you probably shouldn't use this. Use the right tool for the job. This is just one of them. Plus there are alternatives to threads. Look at the state of Atom or VSCode. Much progress has been made in terms of perf and these are not trivial applications.
  - dilann 10y ago
    > Use the right tool for the job That's a funny argument in a thread about js. Js has started as a small language to do scripting on the pages, now they are sticking it everywhere.

jaquers 10y ago

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.

segmondy 10y ago

See the spotify client, popcorn time, visual studio code. these are javascript. They run great.

_prototype_ 10y ago
Also the Slack web client
rbanffy 10y ago
Have you checked how much memory they use? I know we have 8-core laptops with 16 gigs of RAM, but, still, it's excessive.
- segmondy 10y ago
  Don't have an 8 core, or 16 gigs of ram. I'm talking about my desktop. I have a 4 core i5 from 2013. Spotify has 173M in res. Visual studio code with 10 files open has 99M in res. I have firefox open with about 125 tabs open, 6 terminal windows, 2 pdf files open, VLC open but not playing, IRC in about 15 channels. Load average is 0.60. Memory load across all CPU's about 10%. 8gigs used out of 12gigs of ram. With firefox using 5.1 gigs.
- freyr 10y ago
  Any idea why the memory usage is so high? Is it related to the Electron/Chromium platform, or bad application design?
  - rbanffy 10y ago
    Would need to check, but my bet is caching of partially rendered HTML as bitmaps, as well as a full JavaScript JIT environment. It's just a high footprint enironment.