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> Lastly, JavaScript continues to show its strength as a language for GUI programming, being employed in a variety of ways to develop native apps on mobile phon

> Lastly, JavaScript continues to show its strength as a language for GUI programming, being employed in a variety of ways to develop native apps on mobile phones and Smart TVs, though with web view based apps still being the vogue on desktop. Really? I thought over the last decade we let other languages into the browser but Javascript was so amazing that no one uses the other languages. Javascript has had all this competition on the UI layer it’s amazing it came out #1. Am I reading the implication correctly?

LinguaBrowse 1y ago
> I thought over the last decade we let other languages into the browser Not so much! Rhino was an effort to rewrite Netscape Navigator in Java, and I expect that if that rewrite had taken off, Java might've gained a foothold (though indeed, there were Java applets for a time). There were also Flash apps, and of course there are some significant games based on WebAssembly and low-level graphics APIs. But ultimately JavaScript works well for GUI because it is so dynamic, allowing you to be less rigid in how you architect things. And by being a scripting language, it's super quick to iterate on.
- righthand 1y ago
  I was being sarcastic in my post. I find bragging about Javascript as a flourishing UI language omitting quite a bit about why.
  - LinguaBrowse 1y ago
    Eh, writing is hard!
    - righthand 1y ago
      And how!
- breve 1y ago
  > JavaScript works well for GUI because it is so dynamic Amazon moved to WebAssembly for their Prime Video application for both higher and less variable performance: https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-app-for-more-than-8-000-device-types https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-... https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/
- hajile 1y ago
  Java was never going to replace JS in a practical way because of security and the Java JIT taking forever to load and warm up.

LinguaBrowse 1y ago

> I thought over the last decade we let other languages into the browser Not so much! Rhino was an effort to rewrite Netscape Navigator in Java, and I expect that if that rewrite had taken off, Java might've gained a foothold (though indeed, there were Java applets for a time). There were also Flash apps, and of course there are some significant games based on WebAssembly and low-level graphics APIs. But ultimately JavaScript works well for GUI because it is so dynamic, allowing you to be less rigid in how you architect things. And by being a scripting language, it's super quick to iterate on.

righthand 1y ago
I was being sarcastic in my post. I find bragging about Javascript as a flourishing UI language omitting quite a bit about why.
- LinguaBrowse 1y ago
  Eh, writing is hard!
  - righthand 1y ago
    And how!
breve 1y ago
> JavaScript works well for GUI because it is so dynamic Amazon moved to WebAssembly for their Prime Video application for both higher and less variable performance: https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-app-for-more-than-8-000-device-types https://www.amazon.science/blog/how-prime-video-updates-its-... https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/prime-video-rust/
hajile 1y ago
Java was never going to replace JS in a practical way because of security and the Java JIT taking forever to load and warm up.