
The State of JavaScript on Android in 2015 Is Poor (Jeff Atwood) - vyrotek
https://meta.discourse.org/t/the-state-of-javascript-on-android-in-2015-is-poor
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pikzen
"we need to start considering alternatives for the Discourse project."

Discourse hasn't even worked properly on beefy desktops for years. You reap
what you sow when you choose to render your entire application with
Javascript. Inefficient software makes for poor performance on weak machines ?
What a surprise...

~~~
Osiris
The application I work on is rendered entirely in JavaScript. The website is
just a big JavaScript application that acts as an API client to the REST API
that I write.

Because it's all rendered client-side, the flow of the application (which is
basically a single-page app, but with lots of fly-outs, modals, etc) is very
fast and responsive.

The initial startup of the app is a few seconds, but once loaded it is more
responsive than a server-side rendered page.

~~~
pikzen
That... doesn't change the fact that entirely javascript based applications
are a wart on web ?

It's very fast and responsive until I want to disable Javascript because I
don't want terrible scripts using an entire CPU core to animate your flyout. I
don't want to load 20MB of scripts and run them on my machine because the
language and platforms you chose are terrible and you needed to fix the
shortcomings of Javascript, I don't want your application hitting multiple
CDNs telling them where I am (as an example, I do not imply that your
application does so).

And most of all, I do not want to have to maintain your javascript based
software, only held together by all the libraries you used.

If you wanted to make a responsive application, you'd have written it in a
language that compiles to desktop applications (Java/C#/C++/Python/...).
Javascript is the easy way out, where you decide to fuck over your users.

------
Arnt
The state of javascript on Android may be poor.

But I think the key here is that if you plan to do heavy processing on phones,
you're going to lose one way or another. Each new version of Android has
introduced more power saving mechanisms, and I'm not surprised if 6.1 or 6.2
introduces something that restricts how much battery power a pageview is
allowed to cost, particularly when the battery is half-empty or worse.

Which is unfair on Discourse.

