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by nine_k 978 days ago
Browsers are absurdly well-optimized for performance. If you know how to tap it, you can make screaming-fast apps of various kinds, with top-notch graphics, font rendering, accessibility support, audio, video, etc. They also have really solid networking capabilities, as long as you don't need raw TCP or UDP. In particular, HTTP/2, HTTP/3, WebSockets, and WebRTC allow for a lot of advanced things.

By now, you also have WebGL and WASM, if JS's JIT is not fast enough for you.
3 comments
PH95VuimJjqBqy 978 days ago
I love how people use hyperbole such as "screaming fast" and yet a native application that's not even all that optimized will tend to run absolute circles around these "screaming fast" solutions.

How are we supposed to describe these native apps? What's faster than screaming fast? ear shatteringly quick?

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wiseowise 977 days ago
> I love how people use hyperbole such as "screaming fast" and yet a native application that's not even all that optimized will tend to run absolute circles around these "screaming fast" solutions.

And you of course have nontrivial examples to prove that? Or as always source: trust me, bro?

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glimshe 977 days ago
This is like asking to prove the sky is blue in a sunny day. Walk outside and you'll see it. I was talking to friends about how we've forgotten how fast computers are because all we see are web pages and Electron applications. People don't even remember the wonder of native applications.

Try building an operating system or browser engine in Javascript and you'll see what the parent is saying. I'm just giving you these examples because these are some of the last remaining native applications everybody still uses, but pretty much any native application will be much faster than the Javascript version. The reason browser wins is that we got to a point where the performance is "good enough" and the development cost is significantly lower.

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ClimaxGravely 978 days ago
I've definitely seen some really well optimized web targets. Unfortunately that is not the common case in my experience currently.

That said the WebGL/WASM stuff is generally very nice in my experience and is very much changing my opinion. I'm interested to see what comes in the future!

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reactordev 978 days ago
WebGPU is that future.
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chpatrick 978 days ago
No idea why you're being downvoted, you're completely right. And all that runs on every phone and computer from the last 10 years or so
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