Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ankitpati 3121 days ago
I am a C coder, and I cannot wait to have my code on the web, decimating inferior languages like JavaScript. If a startup relies on JavaScript to keep out competition from C coders, well, too bad. They will be decimated in terms of performance. The web will be ruled by the best performing apps written in the language of the Linux kernel.
2 comments
whatever_dude 3121 days ago
Performance in web apps is not a goalpost for everybody. While there's certainly web apps that are problematic in terms of performance, you're unlikely to be running at 100% CPU the whole time, so it's not like using C will be the right solution.

I can see how C/C++ (and, well, more likely Rust) will become a de-facto solution for when you need performance or some type of robustness to your apps (ie probably the right thing for Figma). But the potential performance improvement might be negligible on most makes, and unlikely to offset the fact that you'd be working off a completely different stack making things like debugging and inspecting much harder.

What I think is likely is that using WebAssembly will allow new types of web apps to become popular. Things like video encoders, image editors, etc. Things that you just wouldn't do with JS anyway, at least not in the heavy parts. Thing of a standard web app that uses ffmpeg on the background.

link
flavio81 3121 days ago
>Performance in web apps is not a goalpost for everybody.

But in 2017 startup and companies are starting to understand how fast response times (on a website/web-app) are of critical importance for gaining a good user base.

link
whatever_dude 3121 days ago
True, but in my experience bad UI response times are more related to something goddamned dumb like running a series of super expensive scroll events or watching DOM changes for some idiotic reason, more than about raw processing power.

A C solution might make the former faster, but it'd still be a dumb architecture. A cheaper solution than migrating your whole codebase to a separate language and build process is knowing how to deal with events and how to parallelize (or delegate) stuff correctly.

link
flavio81 3121 days ago
>I am a C coder, and I cannot wait to have my code on the web, decimating inferior languages like JavaScript.

Not only you but many, many programmers out there in other languages, wishing for more performance, or for a higher level of abstraction. I will brace myself for the amazing applications that will be built now for the web.

link