How JavaScript Works: the evolution of graphics | Hacker News Reader

How JavaScript Works: the evolution of graphics

blog.sessionstack.com

40 pointszlatkov9 comments

While the introduction section was informative somewhat, this is really written to promote a commercial service at the end. And it's badly out of place.

It's only mildly informative (it doesn't cover the HTML5/XHTML war, webassembly, shaders, Shockwave, silverlight, etc...) .

And it promotes a commercial service

Frankly I don't think it belongs here

I have started on the java applet fase. You could add an applet to your website and pass parameters in the html code to customize it. Being young and not knowing a lot of programming I would spent a lot of time searching for free applets on the internet. Menus, games, banners... Did not take long for me to learn java and write my own applets.

I guess I'm still interested in this kind of stuff, since my last project is a clone of the Flash software, using JavaScript.

From a programmer's perspective I kinda miss Java Applets. Maybe it's misguided nostalgia, but it was quite fun to pay with them.

No need to miss them, WebAssembly has brought them back.

https://teavm.org/

https://leaningtech.com/cheerpj/

I don’t find it misguided at all. I’m far more productive with JVM languages than JS. It has always bothered me that JS won in the browser environment.

Java applets were clunky and dangerous, but I still wish I didn’t have to delve into JS hell just to make a website.

No word about WebAssembly and ASM.js. That is a key player for modern usage of canvas etc.

Are there any good graphics-specific benchmarks out there? I was under the impression that in modern browsers JS is fast enough that it’s the drawing side (canvas or webgl) that dominates the frame rendering time, and that as long as JS is fast enough to keep the GPU’s queue saturated, CPU performance gains don’t help. But I’m a huge fan of WebAssembly, so I’d be glad to be proven wrong.

I do not know either. I just expect that the traditional game engine runtimes compile to WebAssembly.

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