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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

> While Just-in-Time's supporters will claim that it allows for better optimization or better portability, or they can show some contrived benchmarks where it has a slight edge, we haven't seen such techniques stand up in the real world.

Other than JavaScript, which you're executing right now to post this comment?

Web app usage is huge, and there isn't going to be any shift to native code there anytime soon. NaCl (not PNaCl) has been dead as a proposal for Web content for a long time. That's because JITs actually do allow for better portability.

Edit: OK, HN doesn't actually use JS, so mea culpa on that rhetorical flourish. Still, the point stands that you're using the Web a lot, and that's a testament to the success of JITs.

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Just because they took Usenet away from us, native guys.

A am yet to use any forum online that is as comfortable to use.

> Web app usage is huge, and there isn't going to be any shift to native code there anytime soon.

I am betting on mobile to change the wave.

I didn't even think about Usenet when responding to your comment about forums on the other thread. Still, users of modern web forums would probably view Usenet as archaic. The web platform provides a lot more room for experimentation, because a hundred thousand forums can run a hundred different forum packages with a thousand plugins. The user doesn't have to install an app, because any client-side code is automatically downloaded and run in a sandbox. Even without JavaScript, one can do a lot with HTML forms. If we returned to a standardized application-level protocol (in this case, something like NNTP) accessed by native apps, I think the result would be stagnation like what happened with Usenet. And how many apps for specific forums would a user be willing to install?

Yeah, Usenet isn't exactly the example I would use as a paragon of usability. Even in 1996, I remember it was hard to set up. It's actually a classic example of how the Web won: the frictionless nature of typing the URL of your forum over NNTP configuration dominated all other considerations, even if the Web forum ran a bit slower when you got there.

Nobody took usenet away, people just stopped using it because it became so terrible.

> Edit: OK, HN doesn't actually use JS, so mea culpa on that rhetorical flourish.

Hey now, I'm probably using JS to post this comment because apparently Firefox is made with it!

does HN even use that much JavaScript?

No, AFAICS there's no JS at all in either this page or the "Add Comment" page. One HTML file, one CSS file and a couple of tiny GIFs; that's it.

EDIT: oops, tell a lie, there's a tiny inline snippet to do voting.

That simplicity (both the lack of client-side dynamics and the lack of unnecessary images) renders nice and fast, too. Too many sites waste time with "shiny" javascript tricks, way too many images and other bloat.

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