An Interesting Look At the Performance of JavaScript On Mobile Devices 157
First time accepted submitter faffod writes "Coming from a background of console development, where memory management is a daily concern, I found it interesting that there was any doubt that memory management on a constrained system, like a mobile device, would be a concern. Drew Crawford took the time to document his thoughts, and though there is room for some bikesheding, overall it is spot on. Plus it taught me what bikeshedding means."
Typical console developer rant, IMO. (Score:3, Interesting)
Talks usually end up in most of them dismissing scripting languages, higher level APIs (such as OpenGL), or certain algorithms as useless because they are slow, use too many instructions unnecessarily, waste cache, etc.
Any attempt to raising a point about how you don't need to optimize everything but only few critical zones of your code (what matters), or that a cache wasting algorithm can end up being faster anyway just because it's more efficient, immediately results in myself being dismissed or treated as ignorant because, something inefficient is obviously inefficient and I must be stupid for not realizing that.
This article reminds me of that. The author claims (in his first claim) that he is determined to prove that something is less useful because it's slower, and nowhere in that huge long piece of text there is anything useful offered as proof, instead he keeps posting data about how slow Javascript really is.
Re:What's better than JS? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not the GP but I sympathise with his comment.
"It looks like you want to get rid of all JavaScript in web pages. What's a better way to present interactive forms over the Internet that doesn't involve reloading an entire 100 kB page whenever the tiniest bit changes and doesn't involve paying someone to make six different native applications, one for each operating system?"
Dont force a single 100kB monster to begin with, doh. Break the monster down into bytesized chunks and this suddenly doesnt look so impossible to do in straight html, now does it? You can even keep your 100kB script as well if you want, but you must put a link to the straight version in the noscript tags at the very least. (Personally I urge you to give me an option to use the straight version even in a scriptless browser, otherwise you will probably force me to disable all scripts on your site, but it's not a formal requirement like the noscript tag.)
From day one that was the way you were supposed to do it when you added scripts to your web pages, and it's not that I want to remove all scripts from the web, I want to remove this idiotic assumption it's ok to skip the webpage, hand out a script instead, and pretend all is well. It isnt. Javascript is fine for making a fancier version of a webpage (but only as long as you dont use it as an excuse to skip the simple version.) But scriptless browsers are an integral part of the web as long as it's existed and they arent going away. If you dont support them you arent supporting the web and are missing the point of the web.
With the current threats and trends in malware, you're likely to see only more and more scriptless browsers. Browsers that support scripts just fine are being told not to support YOUR scripts - at least not until you are trusted. Making a good first impression more and more means making a good first impression WITHOUT grabbing your ecmascript crutches, without just ASSUMING that the visitor is immediately comfortable enough with you to be touched in that way.
Even if you cant figure out how to write a webpage or hire someone that knows, you should not need to pay for 6 different native apps - unless your app has a really niche market at least. Just get it written once in a high level language, release it GPL so that anyone interested in porting it to a new platform can. You'll likely have ports contributed back faster than you can pick out the right guy internally to receive them. (This part assumes your app does something that a computer literate person might find useful, of course, it strikes me that is a blind assumption though.)
Dont tell me your afraid to release your precious source - you're doing that right now every time your server sends out 100kB of ecmascript already.