emscripten

[Sean Kelly]

Sean Kelly Wrote:

> Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
> 
> > On 12/14/10 9:25 AM, Sean Kelly wrote:
> > > Adam Ruppe Wrote:
> > >>
> > >> Client side scripting sucks. It's garbage. Slow, incompatible, unreliable, and a
> > >> piece of junk platform in general - it does very little that's interesting. That's
> > >> not even getting into the language itself.
> > >
> > > It totally sucks, but it does scale better than executing everything server-side.
> > 
> > Surprisingly, it doesn't. Facebook is reducing its client-side 
> > Javascript to a minimum in favor of server-side code. Reason? Speed. You 
> > can't control user's OS, browser, and hardware platform, but you can 
> > control your own.
> 
> I don't think speed and scalability are the same thing.  Everything is far faster server-side, but you pay for that in data center real estate.  The trick is finding the right balance.

Oh, I forgot to mention that latency is another issue.  On a slow line, even instantaneous server-side computation can seem slow to the user.  This is probably the largest issue in designing a performant web app these days.  There are solutions (like edge caching) but they can tremendously complicate the app design.