"Or so they say..." Javascript demo | Hacker News Reader

"Or so they say..." Javascript demo

xplsv.com

103 pointselblanco37 comments

Runs awful for me in Firefox, but looks and runs great in Chrome. Really impressive - I think this is the first 'pure HTML' demo I've seen that really sells me on what can be done with Canvas, <audio>, etc - it doesn't feel like a compromised or 'it's cool because it's in the browser' experience, it's a legitimate demo that stands on its own without even considering how it was made.

The first few seconds work well for me in Chrome, but as soon as it gets to the Galaxies it starts to get real slow. This is on a 2GHz Core2Duo. What version of Chrome are you using?

Works well on Chrome 6 dev with a e6600 c2d which is quite old now.

You'll find the answer to that (amd more) in the blog post. http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/702

mrdoob rocks in so many ways.

Works great here, flawless throughout... only 4% CPU load on the dev channel version of Chrome.

Having an octo-core might help out a bit ;)

Works apretty well in Chrome on my ancient desktop machine which is a HP machine with AMD Sempron 3000+ and 2GB of RAM.

Ran pretty well for me in Chrome Dev Channel (Ver 6.0.472), with about 60%-70% processor on my Core2 Duo 3 GHz and an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M.

I especially liked the part where smoke came out of the fan vent on my laptop.

But seriously, if this is where things are headed, why not just run compiled binaries in the browser? There, I said it.

> why not just run compiled binaries in the browser

Indeed, this is the whole point of NaCl.

http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

Compiled for what platform? jamii mentions NaCl, but x86 is a very complicated architecture to emulate. Java applets are better, but there is still a lot of overhead (and most people never performance optimize their Java). I would like to see a plugin system based on LLVM, but we have a ways to go there.

http://code.google.com/p/nacl-llvm-branches/

NaCL is a verifier and a set of userland syscalls, not an emulator.

It's harder to verify that a program doesn't violate the browser's security policies and try to get out of the sandbox. That's why NaCl is such an impressive project.

I don't think compilation per se would make this sort of program run faster. The slowness would be better addressed by giving a lot of computation to the GPU, which is the direction browsers are headed (e.g. WebGL). For whatever reason, people don't like compiling stuff, and I think that's a primary constraint.

All of the heavy lifting that this demo is doing can (and should) be done on the GPU. WebGL should allow that, and the next versions of firefox, chrome, and safari will ship with it (you can play with it in their nightly builds).

Amen to that, I was going to point out the same thing. With the new drivers from AMD supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 on all their cards and Nvidia supporting Opengl 4.1(full OpenGL ES compatibility) for their newest cards (fermi) WebGL is going to kick ass. I'm already using it in Firefox 4 beta 2 and chrome nightlies for work (building some scientific visualization software with it).

All of this because people are too lazy to install software? Why not just run compiled binaries in the operating system?

Because it's more fun to make the web do things it was never intended for and it's still the closest thing we have to a universal write once platform.

Applets, clickonce etc.

Amazing demo for JS. I was really hoping it would work on any iOS device but all they i've tried 3GS/IPAD don't work, but it renders beautifully in chrome.

On a somewhat related but off topic note, I've had this strange idea for a while now that if one had cassandra bindings for JS and a VM image that joined a cassandra image on boot and executed a JS file via Node.JS stored at a well-known key that you could build clusters of almost infinite size that would be accessible to almost every developer. Yes, I think that per node performance would be horrible initially but that the sheer scale and accessibility would make up for it.

How about using a chrome frame, then it can run across all browsers.

I don't think you can get Chrome for the iPad yet. Not holding out for it either.

I believe it already includes Chrome Frame. And it doesn't run on Safari because the <audio> is ogg.

That's pretty cool, especially if you go fullscreen in Chrome. I can really see the potential for a JavaScript demoscene here.

There was a post about that yesterday: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1581400

Runs relatively decent on Chrome 5.0.375.125. As usual, utter functional failure on Opera (10.60).

Can someone more informed explain which one is closer to the truth?

  a) Opera's JS engine does not fully support standard functionality
  b) the demo uses yet-to-be-standardized functions that have been implemented in Chrome

Again, you'll find the answer to that (and more) in the blog post. http://mrdoob.com/blog/post/702

Challenge: shrink it to 1k and submit it to http://js1k.com/

The minified 3D engine is 33k on its own!

That sounds like a challenge to me!

INVALID_STATE_ERR: DOM Exception 11: An attempt was made to use an object that is not, or is no longer, usable.

Safari 5.0.1 mac.

Safari doesn't support .ogg for <audio>. I guess I should show a message for Safari (and IE9) users.

My copy of Safari must be broken then, because it plays the embedded .ogg audio just fine.

You probably installed a theora plugin to quicktime :)

http://xplsv.com/prods/demos/xplsv_orsotheysay/

Install that component and it will play, slightly better than the Chrome dev builds in my experience, but not much.

NERDGASM!

I must say the program in itself is nicely made, not mentioning the javascript-fact of it.

Edit: Too bad does not work in IE9, was hoping to see what video acceleration can do for performance.

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