[williamcotton]

Oh, but it does step up the level of discussion, because there are more important matters involved than mere performance gains. Also, the author of yesterday's article pinned a good deal of his "thesis" on some hand waving about how pocket-sized computers won't increase in performance and memory. He stated that ARM is incapable of keeping up with Moore's Law and will have to be replaced by x86. His statements about the likelihood of vendors being capable of shipping hardware that continues to improve is based on nothing but his opinion. It is not in any way supported by some cursory emails with hardware engineers. The MHz limit has nothing to do with Moore's Law, it merely pushes us Ina multi ore direction... So lets say we have 80 cores... Well, one javascript run time could potentially use an entire core! Also, his one engineer quote admits to having an 'incredibly biased opinion'. Really guys, this kind of stuff is what convinces you?

The reason a veteran like Dan take issue with the hardware and performance side of things is that is what originally held back dynamic interpreted languages in the first place. There were a zillion arguments about how Smalltalk and Lisp were just too damn slow and would never be capable of the performance present in languages closer to the metal. Thought the 90s and the 00s these opinions were clearly rendered moot.

Also, lets think about where are problems are actually bound. With games, 3D rendering and graphics are a big pain point and developers spend a lot of resources to cordon off and optimize this code. And then they frequently use a language like Lua to do everything else. This is basically the approach of APIs like WebGL.