Welcome to the club!  We're finding the advantages of the JavaScript
ecology are many.

I know that language fads come and go, and that the client/server split can
be used to let any language be used for a web page.  Look how well Python
has done, for example.

Emscripten  and Asm.js also promises compiling/transcoding from any
language that can be compiled to LLVM to the Asm subset of JS, which in
turn targets no worse than 1/2 the performance of optimized C/C++.

But the key is this: browsers.  There is only ONE language that can program
the browser and that is JS.  And recent TypedArrays allow JS to talk to any
part of the browser, such as webGL and the GPU.

I just don't see JS becoming a "fad".  Its luck but strategic.  And just as
there was a time where many languages could compile to the JVM (Java's byte
code), JS and Asm.js is now being the compile target for existing languages
as well as languages like CoffeeScript, my favorite.

   -- Owen


On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Gary Schiltz <[email protected]>wrote:

> I'm starting to do a bit of dabbling in mobile development, and have been
> looking at PhoneGap, which uses HTML/CSS/JavaScript. To get an idea how
> performant JavaScript is, I looked for a JS web app that would be processor
> intensive. I found a web app that does ray tracing directly in JavaScript (
> www.slimeland.com/raytrace). Just for grins, I did some runs in all the
> browsers on my MacBook Pro (as well as iOS Safari on my iPhone 4S). I don't
> know how the algorithm would perform if written in C or Java, although I
> suspect it would be a couple of orders of magnitude faster on either.
> Anyway, I loaded the "Original JS Raytracer Scene" preset and then ran once
> with 100x100 resolution and again with 200x200 resolution. The table below
> has the results for the "pixels per second" achieved (hopefully this
> message stays in plain text, otherwise the table will look really look like
> crap...)
>
>                 | PPS (100x100)  |  PPS (200x200)
> ----------------|----------------|---------------
> Safari          |    1610        |      575
> Firefox         |    1480        |      735
> Chrome          |    2422        |     1140
> Opera           |    2235        |     1200
> IE 10 (VMWare)  |    1180        |      660
> iOS Safari      |     185        |       80
> -------------------------------------------------
>
> I'm beginning to share the enthusiasm many FRIAMers have for JavaScript.
> The fact that the same code runs on such a variety of browsers and devices
> is way cool.
>
> ;; Gary
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