3 ms·

Well, this is no more than a showcase. On my fairly modern computer with powerful graphics card it is unbearably slow even in Chrome, while remember, Qt used to

by kombine 14y ago

Well, this is no more than a showcase. On my fairly modern computer with powerful graphics card it is unbearably slow even in Chrome, while remember, Qt used to run on embedded devices with no hardware acceleration whatsoever . Everyone and her granma is excited about web technologies, but this is not the future I want. Native Client approach is a lot more promising, despite not being welcomed well in the industry.

rtpg 14y ago
it might be more of a canvas issue than anything. emscripten gets some good results most of the time (something like 10x speed down compared to g++ -O3). Canvas (and webGL notably) support is there, but its super flaky and hard to make fast.
- kombine 14y ago
  And at which point in history 10x speed down has become acceptable? In certain industries people are trying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of their code, fine tuning cache usage, SSE and whatnot. I just don't see it as an innovation in technologies, quite the opposite in fact.
  - jevinskie 14y ago
    Extreme portability is often worth 10x slowdown.
    - kombine 14y ago
      It sure may be, but JavaScript can't be "extremely" more portable than, say, C++, since all JavaScript engines with majority market share to date are implemented in C++. Also its portability is not an inherent property of JS, it is because of the history.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
  - rtpg 14y ago
    When comparing to other portable systems (python, for example), it's "pretty good". Plus all the messy porting of C libs to different platforms go away (you just need one SDL-to-canvas wrapper instead of 5 different implementations). It allows for a concentration of effort.
  - hosay123 14y ago
    Remember Emscripten is not the last word, it only demonstrates such translators are possible, and I believe is still the only such example thus far. Given a small team the experience might be significantly improved, especially considering Emscripten works by translating LLVM bitcode, even though a less lossy source translation approach may be possible. JS might be the first 'architecture' for which standard C's pointer arithmetic and casting restrictions get put to truly good use.
  - pcwalton 14y ago
    We aren't talking 10x slowdown anyhow—asm.js slowdown is more like 2x, and that's just version 1.
azakai 14y ago
This is just a proof of concept. It uses the raster renderer, for example. Also the code isn't fully optimized. Not necessarily saying this approach (Qt to JS) is the way for GUI apps, but this + hardware accelerated rendering could be interesting.

by kombine 14y ago

rtpg 14y ago

it might be more of a canvas issue than anything. emscripten gets some good results most of the time (something like 10x speed down compared to g++ -O3). Canvas (and webGL notably) support is there, but its super flaky and hard to make fast.

kombine 14y ago
And at which point in history 10x speed down has become acceptable? In certain industries people are trying to squeeze the last bit of performance out of their code, fine tuning cache usage, SSE and whatnot. I just don't see it as an innovation in technologies, quite the opposite in fact.
- jevinskie 14y ago
  Extreme portability is often worth 10x slowdown.
  - kombine 14y ago
    It sure may be, but JavaScript can't be "extremely" more portable than, say, C++, since all JavaScript engines with majority market share to date are implemented in C++. Also its portability is not an inherent property of JS, it is because of the history.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- rtpg 14y ago
  When comparing to other portable systems (python, for example), it's "pretty good". Plus all the messy porting of C libs to different platforms go away (you just need one SDL-to-canvas wrapper instead of 5 different implementations). It allows for a concentration of effort.
- hosay123 14y ago
  Remember Emscripten is not the last word, it only demonstrates such translators are possible, and I believe is still the only such example thus far. Given a small team the experience might be significantly improved, especially considering Emscripten works by translating LLVM bitcode, even though a less lossy source translation approach may be possible. JS might be the first 'architecture' for which standard C's pointer arithmetic and casting restrictions get put to truly good use.
- pcwalton 14y ago
  We aren't talking 10x slowdown anyhow—asm.js slowdown is more like 2x, and that's just version 1.

azakai 14y ago

This is just a proof of concept. It uses the raster renderer, for example. Also the code isn't fully optimized. Not necessarily saying this approach (Qt to JS) is the way for GUI apps, but this + hardware accelerated rendering could be interesting.