4 ms·

> For a web app the speed of the language is rarely the bottleneck anyway I think there’s some selection bias in this; the apps that get built as web apps tend

• shortrounddev2 3y ago
  I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD. I can't think of a single webapp or electron app I use which performs heavy computation. Maybe VSCode? But I don't know if any of the computation is happening on the frontend. People have been extolling the virtues of WASM to me for a while but I have yet to find a use for it where it improved the speed of development, since that's the only metric that matters to me working on CRUD apps
  • jasode 3y ago
    >I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD. This page has a list of examples: https://madewithwebassembly.com/ https://madewithwebassembly.com/ Many apps that are not CRUD need more efficient cpu performance of WASM... physics rendering engines, AutoCAD modeling, machine learning, etc.
    • shortrounddev2 3y ago
      Oh yeah I'm sure those applications exist, I just don't seem to use or work on any of them
  • zztop44 3y ago
    Figma is a good example. Likewise, many games. Google Sheets? GIS apps? Probably the next big things in both DAWs and video editing will be in the browser too…
    • shortrounddev2 3y ago
      Oh yeah I guess Figma is one, but I'm not in the design department. I guess there are a lot of apps out there that benefit from it, but I don't seem to use any of them
  • coldtea 3y ago
    >I've always wondered what kind of apps these are. The vast majority of web apps I use are all CRUD. I can't think of a single webapp or electron app I use which performs heavy computation. Figma Teams (the web version) Outlook (the web version) MS Word (the web version) MS Excel (the web version) Google Documents Google Sheets Google Earth (similarly the iCloud versions for Pages, Numbers, etc) Canva Lightroom (the web version) VSCode Soundtrap and a whole lot more.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Google Sheets is a big one. It really does seem like CRUD when compared ti Excel.
      • paulddraper 3y ago
        Desktop or web Excel?
        • MichaelZuo 3y ago
          Desktop.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  • paulgb 3y ago
    I see it mostly with what I would call “industrial applications”: video editing, CAD, etc. Besides games, consumer software tends not to be computationally intensive, so there are few consumer examples (which I think leads to a sort of “JavaScript is fast enough for everything” fallacy among web devs) I happen to write a newsletter where I interview this sort of company, here are some recent examples that use Wasm: - Rayon (CAD): https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-how-rayon-is-making-cad/ https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-ho... - Modyfi (raster image editing): https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-how-modyfi-is-building-with/ https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/browsertech-digest-ho...
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Webdevs seem to have a blind spot around UI. Plenty of end-user apps - like music players - and websites - like e-commerce stores - tend to have compute-intensive UIs. They may not look compute-intensive for a dev on a beefy machine, playing with mockups and toy loads, but they absolutely become noticeable compute hogs on real machines with real loads. And by "real loads" I really mean just more than two dozen items on a list of whatever it is the app displays.
      • shortrounddev2 3y ago
        My company has several tables in our UI whose API endpoints simply query for all records in that table without pagination. hundreds of rows are loaded into a table plugin, even if you'll never get past the first page
        • TeMPOraL 3y ago
          That's... good. Hundreds of rows is a trivial amount, so unless they're expensive to generate on the backend and/or meaningfully large, it should be a non-issue. The question is, what is the page size in the UI, and why is it less than "hundreds of rows"?
          • 3y ago
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    Even those CRUD apps you and I use daily have substandard performance, as they get bottlenecked by amount of data they can process, in at least two major ways: 1. Code "fast enough" to manipulate a few things (say, listings) will not be fast enough to handle hundreds of them; 2. UI frameworks and components people use are designed to look nice for demo case, which is again few elements, and tend to choke under actual, real workload of dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of elements. Next time you see a website that paginates your results, like e.g. a store that shows you 20 results per page, look for a dropdown controlling the pagination threshold. See if you can bump it to 50 or 100 elements per page, and ask yourself, why do you dread doing so.
• AshleysBrain 3y ago
  We build a full game creation IDE and game engine which is entirely browser-based and almost entirely written in JavaScript (including all the performance-sensitive stuff), and the performance is ridiculously good[1]. You don't need WASM for good performance[2]. [1] https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1/outstanding-game-performance-1584 https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1... [2] https://surma.dev/things/js-to-asc/ https://surma.dev/things/js-to-asc/
  • paulgb 3y ago
    Fair enough, Construct looks cool. If you or anyone from your team is interested in doing an interview for a technical newsletter about browser-based apps[1] I'd be glad to get a JS perspective on high performance in the browser. [1] https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/ https://digest.browsertech.com/archive/