On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 01:42:02 UTC, Etienne wrote:
On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 00:08:52 UTC, Brandon Ragland
wrote:
A downloaded plugin, would be a man-in-the-middle solution.
Users get there "google search away" and developers get the
necessary native speed, flexibility, and components necessary
to perform better work.
The browser is a stellar user-interface engine. Certainly
better than GTK+ or MFC by a long shot. I just don't think the
browser is a useful *operating system* for all these "web
apps" that should be native.
There's been lots of improvements in the DOM, those slick CSS3
transitions are actually hardware accelerated with OpenGL, lots
of GUI front-ends don't event have transitions in the first
place. I wouldn't rely on Javascript for crunching data though,
the "slowness" you talk about? Mostly stems from that.
Otherwise, for display, it certainly is a great tool with lots
of open source components.
Just look at this data table with 640k rows:
http://ui-grid.info/docs/#/tutorial/404_large_data_sets_and_performance
THAT is some good javascript, and it certainly beats what I've
seen Excel do with sheets harboring 10x less data.
While some are still blaming the hammer, I blame the person
trying to hit the nail on the head with his eyes closed.
Exactly why I said the browser is an excellent User Interface
engine, but it's not a good data cruncher, or anything of the
sorts. A full fledged 3D game in the browser using JS wouldn't
run as fast as a fully native, well coded one.
Not to mention that JavaScript is inherently one of the worst
thought-up languages.[2]
Regarding JavaScript being slower, this benchmark[1] seems to
indicate that on average, JavaScript on V8 is at-least 4X slower
than a g++ compiled native package. It also appears to use
anywhere from 2-4X as much memory.
As for why Excel is slow, who knows. I don't genuinely like excel
myself, but it is unbeatable in feature-set as of yet (personal
opinion).
[1]http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/compare.php?lang=v8&lang2=gpp
[2]http://live.julik.nl/2013/05/javascript-is-shit
