D Web Services Application Potential?

[Brandon Ragland via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 01:42:02 UTC, Etienne wrote:
> On Thursday, 30 July 2015 at 00:08:52 UTC, Brandon Ragland 
> wrote:
>> A downloaded plugin, would be a man-in-the-middle solution. 
>> Users get there "google search away" and developers get the 
>> necessary native speed, flexibility, and components necessary 
>> to perform better work.
>>
>> The browser is a stellar user-interface engine. Certainly 
>> better than GTK+ or MFC by a long shot. I just don't think the 
>> browser is a useful *operating system* for all these "web 
>> apps" that should be native.
>
> There's been lots of improvements in the DOM, those slick CSS3 
> transitions are actually hardware accelerated with OpenGL, lots 
> of GUI front-ends don't event have transitions in the first 
> place. I wouldn't rely on Javascript for crunching data though, 
> the "slowness" you talk about? Mostly stems from that. 
> Otherwise, for display, it certainly is a great tool with lots 
> of open source components.
>
> Just look at this data table with 640k rows: 
> http://ui-grid.info/docs/#/tutorial/404_large_data_sets_and_performance
>
> THAT is some good javascript, and it certainly beats what I've 
> seen Excel do with sheets harboring 10x less data.
>
> While some are still blaming the hammer, I blame the person 
> trying to hit the nail on the head with his eyes closed.

Exactly why I said the browser is an excellent User Interface 
engine, but it's not a good data cruncher, or anything of the 
sorts. A full fledged 3D game in the browser using JS wouldn't 
run as fast as a fully native, well coded one.

Not to mention that JavaScript is inherently one of the worst 
thought-up languages.[2]

Regarding JavaScript being slower, this benchmark[1] seems to 
indicate that on average, JavaScript on V8 is at-least 4X slower 
than a g++ compiled native package. It also appears to use 
anywhere from 2-4X as much memory.

As for why Excel is slow, who knows. I don't genuinely like excel 
myself, but it is unbeatable in feature-set as of yet (personal 
opinion).


[1]http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/compare.php?lang=v8&lang2=gpp
[2]http://live.julik.nl/2013/05/javascript-is-shit