5 ms·
> Whether it's human-readable text or binary doesn't make that big of a difference. To people like the grandparent, that is the only thing that matters at all.
by MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> Whether it's human-readable text or binary doesn't make that big of a difference.
To people like the grandparent, that is the only thing that matters at all. It's not a technical problem they have but an emotional one. They do not want the code they write to be a second class citizen to the code someone else writes, and they will absolutely be ecstatic to see us throw away the last 15 years of progress and start from stratch in order to alleviate that problem they have.
- skatepark 14y agoMeanwhile, you web guys are throwing away the last 30 years of progress on consumer application development, and starting from scratch. Web apps are not documents.
- MatthewPhillips 14y agoWeb apps serve a purpose that didn't exist 30 years ago.
- skatepark 14y agoNow I'm very curious what you think that purpose is.
- coldtea 14y agoIts like CS newbies, in the first year of Uni thinking that OSs should be written in assembly to be faster....
- skatepark 14y agoFunny you should mention that, given that I just this week had to use NEON intrinsics to eek out better user-visible wall-time performance in a native app.
- coldtea 14y agoI guess it depends on the program, but for 99% of cases you should not have to. The very few times you would have to go for it, it's usually already part of some library you can use.
- skatepark 14y agoI'm not a fan of a future in which the only people that can do interesting things (including the use of SIMD intrinsics) are the platform vendors (eg, Mozilla), while the rest of us live in a JavaScript sandbox. Maybe Mozilla should try writing their entire browser (VM included) in JavaScript/asm.js and let us know how that goes.
- asadotzler 14y agoLarge parts of the Firefox browser (as distinct from the Gecko+SpiderMonkey) are written in JS. Have a look at the code some time. Or, just open chrome://browser/content/browser.xul in Firefox to get a taste.
- skatepark 14y agoThat's why I said "entire browser". Page rendering, font rendering, <canvas>, et al, are the interesting bits. The use of XUL and the resulting UI clunkiness (speed, responsiveness, nativeness) are pretty well known. A world in which only the vendor gets to write low-level code sounds is a terrible division of labor.
- coldtea 14y ago>I'm not a fan of a future in which the only people that can do interesting things (including the use of SIMD intrinsics) are the platform vendors (eg, Mozilla), while the rest of us live in a JavaScript sandbox. What you describe as bleak is a much better future than what we have now. At least with Mozilla's proposal we will have a well defined low-level optimizable javascript "assembly", whereas now we just have Javascript itself. We never had access to the use of SIMD intrinsics in browsers in the first place, anyway. For that, use native.