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Comment by thasmin | Hacker News Reader

When Chrome was released two years ago, I noticed a significant difference in speed. Nowadays I think the announcements JavaScript performance improvements is a bit overenthusiastic. The only real world benchmark mentioned in the article is that Gmail loads 12% faster. What JavaScript apps are constrained by performance and what are Crankshaft's effects on them?

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I think the point of these optimizations is that they allow javascript-intensive applications to be developed that would otherwise have just been too slow.

In other words, they're paving the way for the future more so than trying to squeeze every last ounce of speed from current applications (which just happens to be a great side effect of their work).

Yeah, you won't see a lot of applications that benefit from these optimizations immediately because if there were any that would mean that they had been written before there was any device capable of running them.

I'm happy that the various javascript teams are developing towards where the web is going rather than where it is.

"A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be." — Wayne Gretzky

I don't think the GP would disagree with you. I believe he was asking what specific apps benefit today (besides GMail which was mentioned in the blog).

I'm guessing you're right. I was responding to the tone of "Nowadays...overenthusiastic" — in support of enthusiasm — and to the notion of naming specific current apps — which I'm imagining as the puck's current location.

We may not even be equipped to answer that question. There are a lot of web-based but private & internal corporate applications that we'll never know about, and can't hope to name.

The coming WebGL games desperately need all the performance they can get.

Much web client JS is constrained by dom speed so this will only have an incremental effect. However, for node apps this willbe pretty significant.

> What JavaScript apps are constrained by performance and what are Crankshaft's effects on them?

Canvas and WebGL games.

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