4 ms·

JavaScript is pretty powerful these days and not really the limiting factor for most use cases. Tinker CAD feels great and it is built with JS/HTML with the 3D

JavaScript is pretty powerful these days and not really the limiting factor for most use cases. Tinker CAD feels great and it is built with JS/HTML with the 3D view done in WebGL/Canvas: https://www.tinkercad.com/ https://www.tinkercad.com/ I could maybe see it for gaming at some point, but it is a long way to go. All screen drawing (canvas, DOM manipulation, etc) are still going through JavaScript. So none of that is any faster.

SeanAnderson 3y ago
Tinker CAD seems fine, but is quite clearly not the full package. Contrast this with the ability to compile CAD to WASM and drop it in. We will see a lot more of that going forward - legacy packages that have had a lot of work put into them becoming web-accessible. It's not necessarily about being faster, but about predictability. You're correct in identifying gaming as one use case. Personally, I am trying to build a basic 2D sim game (think RimWorld) that runs in the browser. I prototyped a demo using TypeScript. React isn't viable because the reconciler isn't intended for handling <canvas /> writes and becomes the perf bottleneck. After that, the GC becomes a bottleneck because of all the allocations. So, my choices were to either write very special JavaScript that intentionally minimized allocations by pooling objects and favoring mutation over immutability, or choose a better language more suited for the task. JavaScript is absolute garbage if you care about micromanaging performance. You have no idea what you're going to get because V8 optimizations constantly change in subtle ways. I've since rewritten my approach in Rust + WASM to address those concerns. It would be nice to be able to have a shared memory buffer that <canvas /> reads from to eliminate the need to call back into JS. I doubt we'll ever get there due to WASM sandboxing, but that has yet to be the limiting factor for me. FWIW, others smarter than me have come to similar conclusions. https://maxbittker.com/making-sandspiel https://maxbittker.com/making-sandspiel documents someone creating an app three times: in JS, in Lua, and then in Rust to get it back into the web. They aren't advocating for UI to be written in Rust, but Rust + WASM did solve a need for them, too.
kaba0 3y ago
Hell, one could write a full 3D FPS game with online interactivity almost a decade ago with WebGL (someone at my uni had such a thesis work). It definitely wouldn’t beat some ray-traced AAA game, but it is surely enough for most things.

SeanAnderson 3y ago

Tinker CAD seems fine, but is quite clearly not the full package. Contrast this with the ability to compile CAD to WASM and drop it in. We will see a lot more of that going forward - legacy packages that have had a lot of work put into them becoming web-accessible. It's not necessarily about being faster, but about predictability. You're correct in identifying gaming as one use case. Personally, I am trying to build a basic 2D sim game (think RimWorld) that runs in the browser. I prototyped a demo using TypeScript. React isn't viable because the reconciler isn't intended for handling <canvas /> writes and becomes the perf bottleneck. After that, the GC becomes a bottleneck because of all the allocations. So, my choices were to either write very special JavaScript that intentionally minimized allocations by pooling objects and favoring mutation over immutability, or choose a better language more suited for the task. JavaScript is absolute garbage if you care about micromanaging performance. You have no idea what you're going to get because V8 optimizations constantly change in subtle ways. I've since rewritten my approach in Rust + WASM to address those concerns. It would be nice to be able to have a shared memory buffer that <canvas /> reads from to eliminate the need to call back into JS. I doubt we'll ever get there due to WASM sandboxing, but that has yet to be the limiting factor for me. FWIW, others smarter than me have come to similar conclusions. https://maxbittker.com/making-sandspiel https://maxbittker.com/making-sandspiel documents someone creating an app three times: in JS, in Lua, and then in Rust to get it back into the web. They aren't advocating for UI to be written in Rust, but Rust + WASM did solve a need for them, too.

kaba0 3y ago

Hell, one could write a full 3D FPS game with online interactivity almost a decade ago with WebGL (someone at my uni had such a thesis work). It definitely wouldn’t beat some ray-traced AAA game, but it is surely enough for most things.