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Every other popular scripting language is much slower in comparison across almost every benchmark, yet you don't hear complaints about writing an application wi

by hajile 8y ago

Every other popular scripting language is much slower in comparison across almost every benchmark, yet you don't hear complaints about writing an application with some other scripting language (eg, python). The problem isn't JS performance -- scripting performance crown was won over a decade ago. The issue is DOM being slow. If you write bindings to a native GUI framework and write your app in JS, performance is going to be extremely acceptable. The biggest issue is that most JS devs aren't comfortable in that universe.

austincheney 8y ago
It isn’t even DOM performance. DOM performance has been fast for about 9 years. The problem is not the DOM but rather all the slow abstractions, including query strings, insecure developers cannot live without. If you are comfortable with the standard DOM methods your UI performance should generally be about 25% of JavaScript execution speed with exception to the visual render of large DOM node injection. It’s typically fast enough that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in performance compared to a GUI written in efficient native code.
- hajile 8y ago
  DOM has always been incredibly slow. Quantum showed that CSS layout has been incredibly slow. Servo showed that HTML layout is incredibly slow. In addition, the DOM is extremely memory intensive no matter what you use. A great example is VS Code switching from HTML to Canvas for Terminal. Performance increased by several times. React Native is another example. It performs much better than a Webview even though it still uses JS. Gnome and GJS perform better than any electron app out there while using way less memory. I assume that when you say query string, you are talking about document.querySelector() rather than the actual query string in the URL. Modern apps using something like React almost never use those. Even with a lot of care, those apps will still be slower than apps written with native GUI frameworks.

by hajile 8y ago

austincheney 8y ago

It isn’t even DOM performance. DOM performance has been fast for about 9 years. The problem is not the DOM but rather all the slow abstractions, including query strings, insecure developers cannot live without. If you are comfortable with the standard DOM methods your UI performance should generally be about 25% of JavaScript execution speed with exception to the visual render of large DOM node injection. It’s typically fast enough that you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference in performance compared to a GUI written in efficient native code.

hajile 8y ago
DOM has always been incredibly slow. Quantum showed that CSS layout has been incredibly slow. Servo showed that HTML layout is incredibly slow. In addition, the DOM is extremely memory intensive no matter what you use. A great example is VS Code switching from HTML to Canvas for Terminal. Performance increased by several times. React Native is another example. It performs much better than a Webview even though it still uses JS. Gnome and GJS perform better than any electron app out there while using way less memory. I assume that when you say query string, you are talking about document.querySelector() rather than the actual query string in the URL. Modern apps using something like React almost never use those. Even with a lot of care, those apps will still be slower than apps written with native GUI frameworks.