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The view that web apps can only be for simple things is a dated perspective, but also probably a symptom of the fact that it's not really possible to take full

The view that web apps can only be for simple things is a dated perspective, but also probably a symptom of the fact that it's not really possible to take full advantage of many CPU cores in a web application. An in-browser photo editor or 3D modeling software would be expected to run much better and apply complex effects or render models much faster on high-end hardware. It sort of works this way with WebGL content, but even there you're limited to feeding the render pipeline with a single thread. I want the web as a platform to succeed. It is the only truly universal runtime and with some care it could offer very few performance trade-offs. I sincerely hope tools like servo and others unlock this potential.

Gravityloss 9y ago
From first principles, one shouldn't expect the menus or other simple rendered parts (things not involving backend traffic) of a user interface to have any perceptible lag on a sub-100 processor, be it an application for web, mobile or desktop. Most likely they shouldn't involve millions of computations or hundreds of megabytes of memory reads. But looking from the other end, somehow they definitely do. And we're probably wasting trillions on this problem. Wasted time, wasted electricity, wasted batteries, wasted computers and phones.
bo1024 9y ago
I think the web should succeed as a platform for so-called "content", but I don't see why the web ought to be best for progams or applications. I still hold the "dated" belief that native is better. The "universal runtime" idea doesn't make sense to me, it's just a single language (javascript) that everyone implements bad, competing interpreters for on different platforms. I don't see why this has to be the only or best way to distribute cross-platform applications.
khedoros1 9y ago
Granted, web apps can be used for complex software. Maybe someday soon we'll install an Electron runtime and install the software to run on it, and it'll be good enough for most things, doubly so moving forward into webassembly. > An in-browser photo editor or 3D modeling software would be expected to run much better and apply complex effects or render models much faster on high-end hardware. Isn't that kind of a tautology?

Gravityloss 9y ago

From first principles, one shouldn't expect the menus or other simple rendered parts (things not involving backend traffic) of a user interface to have any perceptible lag on a sub-100 processor, be it an application for web, mobile or desktop. Most likely they shouldn't involve millions of computations or hundreds of megabytes of memory reads. But looking from the other end, somehow they definitely do. And we're probably wasting trillions on this problem. Wasted time, wasted electricity, wasted batteries, wasted computers and phones.

bo1024 9y ago

I think the web should succeed as a platform for so-called "content", but I don't see why the web ought to be best for progams or applications. I still hold the "dated" belief that native is better. The "universal runtime" idea doesn't make sense to me, it's just a single language (javascript) that everyone implements bad, competing interpreters for on different platforms. I don't see why this has to be the only or best way to distribute cross-platform applications.

khedoros1 9y ago

Granted, web apps can be used for complex software. Maybe someday soon we'll install an Electron runtime and install the software to run on it, and it'll be good enough for most things, doubly so moving forward into webassembly. > An in-browser photo editor or 3D modeling software would be expected to run much better and apply complex effects or render models much faster on high-end hardware. Isn't that kind of a tautology?