[iLoch]

I don't think the other subcomments actually address your concerns, so here's my take: Javascript is the language known by every web developer. Right there, they're opening up their developer audience to a much larger group of people than is possible with C++ or even C#.

"Hard to scale large codebases" isn't really an argument, large code bases are hard in every language, JS isn't really an exception here.

Low level stuff (GC, perf, memory) has been, and will continue to be a problem for Javascript. You can mitigate a lot of the problems with well designed code. React attempts to minimize a lot of those problems with solutions that work for most general use cases (and now with Fiber, we're getting even more granular control.)

Until React moves to Web Assembly you're always going to have overhead when using JS. But let me know when you've got a solution for VR in a web browser that's not JS and I'll give it a try.

[saosebastiao]

All of your comments are fair, although I'd dispute that some codebases are much harder to scale than others (x64 Assembly most definitely begs to differ), and javscript is most definitely one of the worst of the general purpose languages. But even then, as far as realistically cross-platform languages go, javascript is actually one of the best (wow).

I happen to think though that the web is an obvious use case for the React model, and phone UIs are only slightly less obvious low hanging fruit that has worked out really well.

The scalability of the model, however, depends on how much workload you can offload into the React system, and with VR, there is only so much you can do. Even if React is handling all of the rendering with extremely efficient native code, you still have to have a your own full 3d timespace model with realtime response demands. Maybe it will work for extremely basic use cases, but at some point having a familiar language becomes a relatively tiny benefit when compared to an efficient runtime.

[yarper]

> Right there, they're opening up their developer audience to a much larger group of people than is possible with C++ or even C#.

Maybe this is true, but I'd hazard a guess that most developers are not web developers. [1]

Most of us aren't questioning how VR can be done in a browser, but stopping to ask why.

[1]: http://githut.info/

[meheleventyone]

Perhaps because it's a really accessible platform and by baking in support now it will be mature when VR hardware is more generally accessible (2018-2019 for mobile). I'm from a game development background but accessible, interconnected, multi-user VR for all seems like it's something that will come from the web rather than bespoke attempts. Perhaps a better platform will come along with time.