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Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

Well, for example, we could run 1980-era climate model written in Fortran on desktop web browser; it would run with reasonable speed.

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Ah modern technology: using 1000x faster hardware to run 30 year old code at the same speed, but in a browser!

That is what I think every time I see WebGL demos that most of the time remind me of Voodoo or Amiga demos, but hey it is on the browser!

You have accelerated graphics on any modern browser, on any OS, on any CPU architecture. I'll rag on JS as much as the next person but you have to admit 1) that's a pretty big feat 2) it's not an apples to apples comparison.

This is not true, because I have a couple of devices with pefectly fine working OpenGL ES 3.x GPUs where the browsers either don't support any form of WebGL or the FPS are a single digit number.

Really, the 2nd coming of VRML.

Thirty years ago it would have been run on supercomputers.

That's what I would define as a "some obscure edge case", see my comment above.

The thing is that pretty much all Fortran is "some obscure edge case". Otherwise it'd be written in something that's not Fortran.

Another example, I know the guy who maintains NIST's fluid properties solver (back in the day he worked at a subcontractor for NASA characterizing superfluids in fuel tanks). It's ancient Fortran compiled to a windows .dll and wrapped in VB in an excel file. It's super battle tested (being used for nearly 30 years), and it'd be awesome to be exposed in the browser.

I use quite frequently LAPACK (http://www.netlib.org/lapack/) which I would hardly define as "edge case".

Everyone who does any stats uses LAPACK, it's just that most of them aren't aware of it.

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