4 ms·

> Why do web developers constantly make the argument that Javascript is not slower than C (or Swift, or C++, or any native programming language) ? The differenc

> Why do web developers constantly make the argument that Javascript is not slower than C (or Swift, or C++, or any native programming language) ? The difference is night and day, 5000% and up for simple things like drawing. Probably because that's completely untrue, and would be irrelevant even if it were true. If you're doing "drawing" (which in this case means blitting) on the CPU to begin with, you've already lost.

candiodari 10y ago
But this is beside the point. Firstly, I've been doing demos for years, so 1) it is possible, even at high resolutions 2) anything worth doing in opengl can't work in javascript for other reasons (mostly data size). And yes, you could download hundreds of megabytes worth of data files just to show an intro screen and then a few gigabytes for a game over an internet connection. I hope you have patient customers and a huge webhosting budget. So let's be honest here : for small games, the effort of doing it with OpenGL/WebGL is not worth it. For large games it cannot be done, but for other reasons (that actually also apply to small games: 50 megabytes is incredibly oversized for a webpage, but still rather small for a game, so these problems actually overlap) I myself feel guilty for stating this, but it actually works better to render the entire game server-side and videostream it to the client. Yes, javascript (and the web ecosystem) is that bad. Is there no use for it ? Well, I appreciate the speed at which I can try out shaders locally. None of the niceties of javascript such as debugging or any sort of development process work, but it's still nice that you can get up & running in an hour or so. But any reasonable game on javascript or the web platform ? Doesn't work and at this point it's so far from working it's a bad joke.

4 ms·

> Why do web developers constantly make the argument that Javascript is not slower than C (or Swift, or C++, or any native programming language) ? The differenc

by pcwalton 10y ago

candiodari 10y ago
But this is beside the point. Firstly, I've been doing demos for years, so 1) it is possible, even at high resolutions 2) anything worth doing in opengl can't work in javascript for other reasons (mostly data size). And yes, you could download hundreds of megabytes worth of data files just to show an intro screen and then a few gigabytes for a game over an internet connection. I hope you have patient customers and a huge webhosting budget. So let's be honest here : for small games, the effort of doing it with OpenGL/WebGL is not worth it. For large games it cannot be done, but for other reasons (that actually also apply to small games: 50 megabytes is incredibly oversized for a webpage, but still rather small for a game, so these problems actually overlap) I myself feel guilty for stating this, but it actually works better to render the entire game server-side and videostream it to the client. Yes, javascript (and the web ecosystem) is that bad. Is there no use for it ? Well, I appreciate the speed at which I can try out shaders locally. None of the niceties of javascript such as debugging or any sort of development process work, but it's still nice that you can get up & running in an hour or so. But any reasonable game on javascript or the web platform ? Doesn't work and at this point it's so far from working it's a bad joke.