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Trying To Bust JavaScript Out of the Browser
eldavojohn writes "If you think JavaScript is a crime against humanity, you might want to skip this article, because Ars is reporting on efforts to take JavaScript to the next level. With the new ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the article points out a lot of positive things that have happened in the world of JavaScript. The article does a good job of citing some of the major problems with JavaScript and how a reborn library called CommonJS (formerly ServerJS) is addressing each of those problems. No one can deny JavaScript's usefulness on the front end of the web, but if you're a developer do you support the efforts to move it beyond that?"
Perhaps it's a great language, but it reduced modern Core i7 computers to performance of a 486, negating 15 years of computing revolution. Inability to perform CPU-intensive computations due to these dynamic types of yours, lack of threading or any other explicit or implicit parallelism support, no library facilities to modern 2D/3D graphics libraries. Javascript is a nice experimental language like so many others but it shouldn't be running 90% of mission-critical applications.
A-friggin-men. JavaScript is one of the few popular languages with first-class functions. How many JS-bashers have actually written something more than document.write() rubbish?
How about those demos where Google was demonstrating V8, one of the "fastest" JS implementations available, which DOES use JIT to native machine code? They were PROUD to demo like a few hundred bouncing balls on a modern computer at not even 60 fps.
Written in C you could write an app to draw and compute the motion of tens of thousands of fucking balls at 60 fps on a modern computer.
Within 2 orders of magnitude is not "close" to C performance. Within 2 orders of magnitude is not "acceptable" performance.