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@Root It isn't written in JS, mostly wasm and webgl with some js glue I think. And modern language agnostic game engines show that the efficiency of the scripting language that links together engine features is insignificant compared to the quality and usage of those features.
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Root797344y@homo-lorens Kinda missing the point.
The trend is heavily towards yet more layers of abstraction.
Instead of abstraction over hardware and input (OS kernel), and abstraction over kernel and drivers (OS user land), it’s now abstraction over compile time language (JavaScript vm), OS and the device itself (browsers), and now browser and scripting indirection, too (wasm).
All of this abstraction eats so many resources it’s crazy.
Think of the hundreds of millions of instructions that must run in order to execute this bit of JavaScript:
`var x = 12; x += 1;`
Abstraction is good and all, but I believe we have a fetish for it and are pushing it too far. It feels like some day soon, everything will run within a browser, and our devices will be little more than chromebooks. Hell, html is even being used for some mobile interfaces. It’s like we’re returning to the era of dumb terminals, just with caching and gps this time.
And all of this?
It takes control out of the hands of the users. And it is terrible for privacy, too. -
@Root Most browsers are written in compiled language, they compile wasm to native assembly and they transpile JS to a bytecode that is either JITed or executed by an optimizing interpreter. So there aren't actually that many layers of abstraction. I think that empowering webapps until everything that needs platform independence can run on these standard languages is a logical step.
The privacy risk comes from storing data in the cloud, not from writing applications in javascript. There's localstorage, indexeddb and the filesystem API, server side storage isn't the default anymore. And the same applies for networking. With CORS it's plausible to build APIs that are accessible from any website without a trip to the owner's server. It is very easy to publish an application on a CDN and provide a service with localstorage and optional third party storage options. -
What is dangerous is the culture of not caring about what you're running, which is reinforced now by the fact that a webapp has no effective way to grab information it's not supposed to have on the client side, but I think this is a lesson for society that we have to learn the hard way.
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