compiled to JavaScript idea

[Thomas Reilly]

Thanks for the rebutal, I was wondering if my wild claims would go
unchallenged ;-)

> The flash version is indeed snappy by comparison, but it's kind of a
rigged game. 

Despite my allegences to the mother ship I wasn't recommending Flash or
Silverlight.  I was pointing out that folks are feeling compelled to
resort to them for performance reasons.   Why does Gmail use flash under
the covers for instance?  I'll leave it as a dtrace exercise for the
curious but I bet performance might have something to do with it.

> If we can get similar performance for tasks like this in 
> raw-browser environments (on today's ES3 implementations), 
> then biting off the entire rendering phase is absolutely the 
> wrong problem to solve. 

Again, not my point, its not like these engines are using ES3 to do the
rendering (although I could go off on a tangent about how if you had ES4
and certain key optimizations in the JIT than you could write a fine
renderer in ES4).

> Your example points out to me not that having a better VM
matters...it's that the level of 
> effort to get to a UI which is completely inappropriate on my Mac is
tremendously high ;-)

I know right?  Where's the mac love?  If you don't need more performance
out of your JS engine then good for you!  Lots of people I think want
more performance out of there browsers scripting language and ES4 will
be a catalyst for getting there.  My point is that certain ES4 features
(ie classes and strong typing) will enble (in theory) ES4
implementations to provide the same level of performance Java and C#
have.

This is the second time I've heard Safari 3's performance being raved
about.  Anyone have any benchmark pointers?

> > Salient point:  we should pimp the performance potential of 
> ES4 more 
> > and label the anti-ES4 crowd as performance-haters which I 
> don't think 
> > is far from the truth.
> 
> This strikes me as both dangerous and wrong. That many of the 
> folks railing against ES4 are using weak arguments doesn't 
> seem to me to be a green light to do the same in favor of the 
> new language.

Why is my argument weak?  Please tell me how ES3 can reach the same
level of performance as Java/C#, I'd love to hear it!  

Maybe its an indulgence on my part to jump to the conclusion that
certain ES4 detractors are doing so b/c they don't want ES4
implementation to match their own preferred language/platform in
performance but I stand by my claim that ES4 is an enabler for such
performance gains.