On 2011-07-25, at 12:47 AM, Alan Kay wrote: > For example, some of our next version of Etoys for children could be done in > JS, but not all -- e.g. the Kedama massively parallel programmable particle > system made by Yoshiki cannot be implemented to run fast enough in JS. It > needs something much faster and lower level -- and this something has not > existed until the Chrome native client (and this only in Chrome which is only > about 11% penetrated).
You don't have to wait for Chrome Native Client to have native levels of performance. Most of the current crop of browsers (i.e. not IE) use tracing JIT compilers to get close to native performance (in this experiment writing a CPU emulator in JS, one emulated instruction took approximately 20 native instructions: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/11/implementing_a.html). Javascript is fast and getting faster, with array operations coming soon and Web Workers for safe parallelism (purely message-based threads) available now. You can play 3D shooters, edit video, synthesize audio, and run Linux on an emulated CPU in Javascript. I'm not sure what part of that is not fast enough. Some of it is cruft and some of it is less than elegant. But having higher level primitives (like what SVG and Canvas provide) isn't all bad. --Dethe _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
