[reitzensteinm]

I have done both of those things (though my real time web app is written in React/cljs), and I agree entirely with the grandparent.

The difference isn't in the technical details, the difference is that a chat app with a 1 second redraw can succeed in the marketplace, whereas a game with a 1 second redraw will never be played. The bloat and inefficient abstractions grow to the limit of our tolerance.

If CPUs had hit the wall at 66mhz single core, that chat app would somehow still take the same 1s to redraw. Of course, it would probably be written in something like NaCL and have significantly more engineering effort put into optimization, with a browser stack engineered for high performance.

[sliverstorm]

The bloat and inefficient abstractions grow to the limit of our tolerance.

Which is tragic in some ways IMO. It means every system is always optimized to the level of misery where you are just barely not willing to do something about it. Which when you think about it sounds kind of like what you would expect from a lesser circle of hell.

[robmcm]

Apparently in the early days of HDTV, cable/satellite companies would slowly reduce the quality of broadcasts until people started complaining. At which point they stopped.

When BBC HD was a channel, its quanily was black and white to everything else, now even they are in on the reduced bandwidth game :(