[rbehrends]

This really needs to be stressed more. I was underwhelmed by that article, too, because the author does not seem to have a deep understanding of the issues involved (specifically JIT compilation and automatic memory management) necessary. The overall conclusion -- that mobile HTML5 apps have inherent performance problems -- may well be correct, but not for the reason that he gives and for data that he often seems to misread.

The most glaring issue was probably the garbage collection performance graph: He picked out the performance of mark and sweep collectors to make a bold statement about memory usage necessary for performance, and completely ignored the data for the generational collectors for that statement.

This is not to say that garbage collection is a non-problem in mobile applications (it can be, but the argument for why is trickier and is not easily translated into soundbites), but somebody flat-out ignoring data does not inspire confidence.

The big problem is that the author doesn't ever seem to have seen a compiler from the inside, yet makes sweeping statements about programming language technology that simply aren't borne out by fact.