A lot of people are underestimating what this stuff can be used for, IMO. It goes far beyond traditional games. I myself have been doing a lot of work with WebGL-driven articles [1]. With nothing more than nginx and Jekyll, I have an incredibly efficient pipeline to get 3D math lectures out to thousands with less than 20KB of JS per graph and 200KB of shared libraries. I can edit the content anytime I want and rsync an update. I got a 100k hits on that article last month, my little linode didn't break a sweat.

I've also been working on setting up GLSL based computational chains easily, allowing me to implement a fluid dynamics solver [2] with a dozen lines of JS and a hundred lines of GLSL [3].

It's not as demoscene-like as it seems, I don't have to work very hard to get it to run well, as JS is rarely the bottleneck.

Dedicated game engines will always be the realm of optimized native code, but there is an entire field outside that of rich 3D content. Between GLSL, Web Workers and fast JITs, there is a lot that can be done here. With JS, you not only get a platform you can deploy easily, but you get live access to a fully introspective VM at the same time. I expose all my JS to the console, and do most of my prototyping in there. All for free.

It's also the only platform that has a chance to be available universally, from pockets to desks to living rooms. I know I'd much rather restrict myself to techniques that are a couple years old, if it means it actually runs well on modest hardware—which a lot of demoscene stuff does not do.

[1] http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal

[2] http://acko.net/files/never-seen-the-sky/git/

[3] https://github.com/unconed/NeverSeenTheSky/blob/master/js/fl...