

Will JavaScript get fast enough? - cek
http://shaver.off.net/diary/2011/10/28/approaches-to-performance/

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Detrus
At the last Google I/O (2011) the V8 team mentioned they've done all the major
optimizations they could and the focus should now be on DOM/CSS/etc to get
more performance. I'm guessing that's why they have the Dart effort, to change
the language to build a faster VM on top but maintain legacy support.

So from this point, how much faster can current JS get? Does Mozilla's JIT/VM
approach have a higher performance potential than V8?

I think the major problem is the improvement speed of the web. Mobile OSs are
rapidly advancing in features, speed and users, while web and its minions are
complacent. They point to the old victory of open Web over closed AOL/Prodigy
and pretend the situation is the same now - _always bet on JS._

JS and the open web have a lot of political clout but I wouldn't bet on the
technology improving rapidly when the decision making process is mired in
politics. The open web can remain a dominant platform for a decade even if its
technology stagnates. It's not much of a bet.

A major feature of Native Client is it allows a part of the web stack to be
removed from the political circus. Look at CoffeeScript's popularity and
usefulness. What if the creator had to ask Google/MS/Mozilla for their point
of view, it would never happen. A piece of the stack, JavaScript, was flexible
enough to avoid the open argument circus and be tested in production. What if
it was more flexible?

That's what Native Client allows, to agree only on parts where we can't handle
disagreement technologically and have more experimentation with the rest.

