SIMD For JavaScript Continues Coming Along

[curaga]

If you disagree with the appification of the web, put your money where your mouth is and move to a browser that opposes that shit.

[Luke_Wolf]

But you are proposinng to use PNaCl, isn't it fundamentally wrong?

It is, but if you're going to do it, at least do it right, and make a real desktop application that you are then hooking up to PNaCl. Instead of trying to hack the reverse into working.

[Luke_Wolf]

If you disagree with the appification of the web, put your money where your mouth is and move to a browser that opposes that shit.

And which one would that be?
Mozilla? Supports this crap.
Chrome? Supports this crap.
Opera? Supported this crap before it was cool.
IE? I'm not going to use windows for my main OS, and besides they don't exactly oppose it.
Misc Webkit Browsers of the world? none of them oppose it AFAIK, and I've been unsuccessful in using them despite wanting to because of incompatibilities with the modern web, forcing the usage of one of the big 3.

So please tell me what should I be using?

[Azrael5]

SSE instructions exist since 30 years and they are rarely used... they sell CPUs provided with 20 cores to make operations one core could be make easy implementing SSE2 software. Absurd... $$$ is against evolution.

[asdfblah]

dungeon dislikes this.

[deppman]

JavaScript is evolving

SIMD for JS is like DRI3 - it doesn't remove the problem (X11) but makes it bearable.
The other shitty workaround around the shitty JavaScript was asm.js.
The other shitty workaround around JavaScript was adding float arrays for webgl as built in types because the devs discovered (omg!) that in the real world JavaScript sucks and needs to deal with types.
Who knows what other shitty workarounds they'll need to figure out to further work around the main problem - JavaScript.

Yes JavaScript is evolving. And yes, it's not a very nice language, with a fair amount of cruft and frustrating limitations. And because it has been treated like a disposable language and is often used by novices and "cut 'n paste" developers, there is a lot of horrible code out there - just like with PHP and Perl before it.

But it also has a lot going for it, like 2 billion or so devices that run it, most with update mechanisms in place to use the smid instructions once they become available. It is also just about the fastest dynamic language, often 7-15x faster than Python, Perl, Ruby, and the ilk. We can thank the amazing JIT compilers created by Google, Mozilla, and later Microsoft as each competed to provide the best performance. It is in some ways more complete than competing languages as the event mechanism is assumed at its very core, and not tacked on later.

About 5 years ago, I was contemplating focusing on Scala and the JVM to replace mod_perl application servers - or embrace NodeJS instead. I was tempted to be a language snob and go with Scala, but my pragmatic side won out and I instead decided to go with JS and Node. I think the market has proved the wisdom of my decision.

SMID, SVG, OGL, better typing, better flow controls, and better threading are all coming to JavaScript. It is better to evolve the language - which does a lot of things very well already - than to discard it and replace it. Google is working towards that with Dart, and it still hasn't made much of a dent. In fact, Dart seems to be more of a proving ground were good ideas are first field tested before being merged into core JS.

Your anger is not irrational, especially if you invested in alternate technology. But it isn't very pragmatic either. If you are a good developer and embrace JS, the world's your oyster.

[Szzz]

It is better to evolve the language - which does a lot of things very well already - than to discard it and replace it. Google is working towards that with Dart, and it still hasn't made much of a dent. In fact, Dart seems to be more of a proving ground were good ideas are first field tested before being merged into core JS.

Dart is also wrong. Not as a language but the idea that m browsers should support n languages, this has m*n complexity. Instead there should be some standard bytecode and VM so that browsers will need to support it and anyone will be able to make compiler from their crappy language to this bytecode, this has m+n complexity. Instead people are compiling to javascript. Compiling one programming language to another is stupid.

[deppman]

I agree

Dart is also wrong. Not as a language but the idea that m browsers should support n languages, this has m*n complexity. Instead there should be some standard bytecode and VM so that browsers will need to support it and anyone will be able to make compiler from their crappy language to this bytecode, this has m+n complexity. Instead people are compiling to javascript. Compiling one programming language to another is stupid.

I agree. I do not like coffeescrpit and typescript and other silly languages that compile to js. They usually add much more complexity than they avoid, especially when debugging. Code standards, IDEs,and lint tools can help avoid some of the type manipulations that are problematic in JS, but the core language still needs more data types to be more efficient. Using a double precision float for a simple counter is just plain silly.

[curaga]

Misc Webkit Browsers of the world? none of them oppose it AFAIK, and I've been unsuccessful in using them despite wanting to because of incompatibilities with the modern web, forcing the usage of one of the big 3.

So please tell me what should I be using?

http://surf.suckless.org/

Or something new, if only Cairo devs could get off their asses.

[wizard69]

Yes and this is its problem. There is nothing wrong in trying to add more cool things to webpages. What stops (or at least hinders) from doing this is js. That's why we need something better for web programming.

Err NO! What we need is for developers to not try to turn a web viewer into a monstrosity that rivals EMACS, Eclipse or an the other massively over sized solutions out there. JavaScript is fine for what it is designed for. If it doesn't fit your app then maybe your app should be web based. This is one of the great things about IOS and the turn to native apps for many of the cloud services out there, all of the performance issues and clunkiness of complex web based apps go away with some well designed native code.

What the Linux & BSD worlds need is a way to write these sorts of apps with the same ease. Do away with the reliance on the web browser as an app delivery vehicle.