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Comment by brotherjerky | Hacker News Reader

So the biggest phone manufacturer now owns a lot of Node.js expertise. Hopefully that leads to more JS in mobile!

I had a friend ask why the Oneplus one 3 could possibly need 6GB of RAM. Thank you for providing a possible answer! :)

Well, buffering 4K video, while running other active services in the background... finally broke down and installed FB messenger again, and it's definitely better, but there are a lot of consistent apps that tend to be very bloated as it is.

Given how well React Native tends to work, and I have to be honest, I like the ecosystem structure better than most apps I've worked on in general, I can see it actually working out better in many cases.

> finally broke down and installed FB messenger again,

Prob not great for more advanced messenger functionality but Face Slim (https://github.com/indywidualny/FaceSlim) does notifications and simple/group chats fairly well.

What sucks is I was perfectly happy with fb web, until they started cutting features in mobile (can't post to a friend's wall, can't do a lot of things now). The biggest issue is FB the app didn't respect the environment/usability settings for extra large fonts.

They're definitely doing research for efficient JS on low end devices:

- AOT compilation for a subset of JS: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-13...

- "A JavaScript engine for Internet of Things": http://samsung.github.io/jerryscript/

The only thing JS has going for it is it's wide adoption. Basing a new language on it to run on low end devices just seems like a dead-end for me. At least the first link is to a typed subset of JS.

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