[gmueckl]

Your rant is focused so much on the actual implementation details of Flash that it misses the point that the abstract concept of a VM based application container/sandbox could have been a great thing. In fact, it was such a great idea that browser developers were forced into a pretty tough struggle to actually kill it in order to stay relevant themselves. Adobe's poor stewardship sealed the deal, not conceptual shortcomings.

[MrJohz]

Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox. The difference is that JavaScript has more ready access to the DOM, but Flash was also able to do that, it just used JavaScript as a bridge.

[grishka]

The point is that you didn't need DOM. You had a canvas to draw things on and to handle clicks in. Now you need the DOM either way and it's cumbersome. It feels like trying to build a UI in a word processor. Text nodes are such a terrible idea...

[rektide]

Having a hypermedia standard is universes more interesting & powerful & enriching than what boils dowm to a way to generate gifs. Computers have dozens of ways to throw pixels at peoplecs faces and none of them are remarkable or particularly noteable.

Having a DOM, having structure, having a hypermedium is a source of immense potential & power. For both developer, but also, capitally & uniquely, for users too.

This longer top-commemt talks some to why documents, why hypermedia is enriching: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31373988

[DeathArrow]

>Having a DOM, having structure, having a hypermedium is a source of immense potential & power.

For documents, yes. For apps those are obstacles. Apps just need something to draw on.

[rektide]

Your statement doesnt resemble any gui toolkits Im familiar with. Not Flutter, not Swift, not Gnome, nothing. The DOM closely resembles other ui construction systems & has similar ideas lile event handling.

And then the pretense that developers are the only thing that matter. The web is vastly better than apps because of the dom, because our systems are in a malleable hypermedia that ysers can modify eith userscripts, userstyles, extensions, eith whatever manner of accessible browser/user agent they please.

It's such sad thing to hear people advocating so strongly for the winnowing od possibility. Leaving all responsibility & all power with the app developer sounds perverse to me, sick, unworthy of being called a part of the internet. Not only does "just need something to draw on" not reflect the needs of developers, it represents an mortal threat to user agency.

[grishka]

The very big difference between the web and a proper GUI toolkit is that in GUI toolkits, inline elements aren't a thing, period. Text nodes also aren't a thing and don't mess up your layout when you least expect it (argh). You need to explicitly create a "text view" or label of some sort to display text. GUI toolkits also usually offer layout algorithms that make sense for GUIs. Oh and did I mention that they have sane defaults like not insisting on using the intrinsic sizes of things unless you explicitly tell them to?

Another property GUI toolkits have that the web lacks is that the GUI toolkit is usually made of the exact same kind of code you're writing your app in. There's a much tighter integration between the app and the toolkit. The app can extend it much more sensibly by, for example, implementing custom layout algorithms. With the web, there's this issue of the browser implementing all the layout and drawing and doing all the work and you can only provide input parameters to these hard-wired algorithms — you can't build your own.

Yes, I'm aware of those layout and paint worklets being worked on. Yes, they solve some of these problems and thankfully move the web platform closer to feature-completeness. It's still a mess though.

[MrJohz]

You still have the canvas, and it's perfectly easy to draw on that and handle events in JavaScript. There are a number of applications that work that way.

That said I disagree with the idea that using the DOM is bad - I suspect it's cumbersome to you mainly because you're not used to it. The number one benefit of the DOM is that user-facing controls are largely consistent. If I want the user to type text into a text box, I can just use a browser-defined element, and the user will be able to interact with that exactly as they expect. I don't need to reimplement the whole text input and display process, because it already exists in the platform. The same goes for all sorts of controls and interactions, from zooming to select boxes.

Moreover, assuming this DOM is built up in a way where the semantics are embedded in the elements themselves, then it can also be used in different ways. One user might use their browser to render the DOM into something that can see on their screen, while another might use their browser to read the element contents aloud. One person might use their mouse to interact with the system while another might use their keyboard. Accessibility is built into every application built using the DOM - it may not be ideally presented in some situations, and it's still possible to get things wrong, but by default a blind user will at least have a chance of using the system. In contrast, a canvas-based application will need to reimplement accessibility from the ground up (usually in the form of a secondary hidden DOM tree).

[discreteevent]

Exactly. When I first did a web front end it felt exactly like customising MS Word with VBA. No matter what you put on top of it the roots poke their heads through and it feels like a mess.

[grishka]

Yes, yes. Flash (with AS3) was a first-class web application platform. There were buttons and views and "movie clips" and other stuff for you to place on a blank canvas, all very customizable. Then there was Flex, a full-fledged yet relatively lightweight application framework built on that foundation. You created your layouts with XML, with live preview. There were Android-like layout containers (emulating Android's LinearLayout with HTML+CSS is still not quite trivial in 2022 — the defaults on flexbox are bonkers) and there were ListView/(UI|NS)CollectionView-style lists with reusable cells, among other things. This was 15 years ago! I can't even begin to imagine how many workarounds one would need to implement a list with reusable cells with HTML+JS even if targeting only the latest Chrome and Firefox.

HTML is a document format at its heart and there's no getting around that, but <object> is/was a nice escape hatch.

[DeathArrow]

>Isn't that what we have? JavaScript is a VM-based sandbox.

JS is unfit for the task. It is a dynamic scripting language introduced by Netscape for the only purpose of adding a bit of interactivity to web pages, not to create large apps.

.NET and Java are much better for the task. The VMs support better languages with better libraries and more sane ecosystems. And the performance would be much better than that of JS.

And is easier to write an application using Xamarin or MAUI then using React.

When you write Java or .NET apps you write to target a computer which is a much better model for the apps then Web.

With "app languages" you can write apps better, faster while having better performance and more capabilities than using dynamic scripting languages like Javascript, Lua or Python.

Operating systems and browsers are apps too. And we don't use Javascript to write them.

You can write anything in any Turing complete language. But you'll be a fool if you attempt it for anything but fun.

[MrJohz]

I think what your describing is mainly your preference - which isn't in itself a bad thing, the lack of real diversity in browser scripting is a problem that is slowly being solved as WASM becomes a more viable target.

That said, some of your statements seem to be simply false. Javascript engines are at this point about as heavily optimised as Java and .NET runtimes, and a quick scan through a few benchmark sights seems to indicate that, with a few exceptions, the two perform similarly well. Certainly, there is no guarantee that a naïve implementation in Java will necessarily be faster than a similar one in Javascript, in the way one night expect with e.g. C and Python.

Moreover, JavaScript is regularly used in all sorts of applications and systems - Gnome, for example, uses JavaScript for various plugins and utilities, an increasing number of applications are written using Electron or other webview-based technologies, even browsers use JavaScript for a significant number of controls (e.g. the devtools for most browsers are written in JavaScript). So clearly a lot of people see value in writing all sorts of applications in JavaScript.

The rest of your complaints seem to be largely your opinion - again, perfectly valid, but other people will have different opinions, and so the value proposition for JavaScript will be different for them. For example, for me, building something in React is a cinch, whereas Xamarin would take a lot more work. And the ecosystem of JavaScript may not be perfect, but it's very well oriented towards building front-end apps, something that isn't as true of Java.

[gmueckl]

JavaScript VMs are inherently hampered by language design choices in JS. The dynamic typing and prototype based objects limit JIT based optimization for the full JS massively. Java and .NET have fully static typing which allows their JITs to be completely certain when they are translating code. JS JITs constantly have to add overhead in the form of escape hatches to deoptimized code if e.g. expectations about variable types are being broken at runtime.

[grishka]

Yes. The standard itself (the swf file format, the AVM bytecode, etc) is actually open. To their credit, Adobe has all the relevant specs on their website.