Hacker News Reader

Comment by jfaucett | Hacker News Reader

I love the fact that Mozilla keeps pushing javascript to its limits. They seem to be doing a lot of things really well lately, this is awesome!! Plus you have Firefox OS, which pushes web-standards to native mobile. Now I just wish the devtools would get up to paar with those on chrome/chromium and I'd be switching back to FF in a heartbeat.

I wish google would stay on board with JS since they have the engineering power to do a lot in this area, but to me it seems after V8 they've kind of abbonned JS in favor of Dart (As oppossed to supporting asm.js). For instance, I just did the "try anyway" in chrome 26.0 linux and everything crashed. Did anyone get it working in chrome?

View on HN

From the FAQ:

    - Chrome currently crashes, but is expected to be resolved by the Chrome team soon.

http://www.unrealengine.com/html5_faq/

I wish I had read that first :/

Crashed my whole system

Chromium 25.0.1364.160 Ubuntu 12.04

This shouldn't be possible if the OS is written correctly. :-\

He's on Ubuntu. Anything is possible to make it crash.

Both of these comments are idiotic and flamebait.

Now that is an example of a high-quality comment! Adds value to the conversation and in no way may be considered flamebait. :-p

You would think, but I've noticed that on HN specifically, the comment pointing out that a stupid argument is forming--if it gets in early enough--tends to be both highly upvoted, and the end of the argument. One reason I like this community.

There was no argument, whether "stupid" or not. You're welcome to start one.

There already was another comment pointing out that one could kill the process from another tty.

I interpreted "Crashed my whole system" as meaning that option wasn't possible.

And yours is very polite and contribute a lot to the discussion ;-)

but being the devils advocate here, both parents of your comment are not that far off.

Ubuntu is more prone to crash because it invites the user to install much more closed source and proprietary code, by design. so they are not that idiotic and flamebaitic.

My bet: the OS and all the code running on it is written correctly. and you can see it gave you a warning about tainted kernel when you loaded that piece of crap nvidia/ati proprietary driver.

How? Couldn't you even drop to another TTY and kill the process?

I'd bet money OP didn't even try or doesnt know how to do that.

This is what I thought to.

I've never once had an application in Linux crash the whole OS - or at least not so long as I've had physical access to the machine (I've had rouge database requests brick a server before because it took down sshd - but that's a different story)

In fact on the laptop I'm on now, the parent link crashed Firefox. But it OOM'ed and got killed before I even noticed there was a problem (and that's on a beefy desktop environment with compositing enabled too)

You should tell your database to go easy on the rouge - a lady keeps it subtle.

I've had problems with fglrx where it crashes because you resize the window too quickly, and then it's done something really funky, so when you do CTRL+ALT+F_N it doesn't actually give you a shell.

Just took out that tab for me in windows. Seems like something else is probably going on for you.

Chromium has been a little dodgy for me lately too. Lots of memory leaks and what not. I've had to kill it's parent process id on a number of occasions (but even then, there's no reason why a browser should take out the whole OS).

Same here. Google has to do something with all these memory leaks.

...Or releasing their iron grip on the repo.

They are also not really visibly working on issues like these: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=222558 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=134837

Basically, each font in each size uses some handles in a renderer. At 10000 handles, the tab renderer dies. They have a font cache but never clear it. When enough render processes together use too many GDI handles, the whole Windows desktop breaks down.

Same here; google-chrome-unstable-28.0.1485.0-195393.x86_64 on Fedora 18.

Hardest crash I've experienced on this new setup.

On Chromium 25.0.1364.160 on Ubuntu 13.04 just the running tab died.

>[Google has] kind of abbonned JS in favor of Dart

Where did you get that idea? Just look at these graphs:

http://www.dartlang.org/performance/

Apparently, they are still trying to make V8 faster. V8's graph isn't flat and there are also very recent bumps.

>As oppossed to supporting asm.js

Asm.js is about JavaScript the compiler target, not JavaScript itself. Using asm.js means writing code in C/C++ (or something similar), which means it's more comparable to PNaCl than Dart.

While generally that is true about asm.js, there is nothing stopping anyone from writing asm.js code by hand.

It is still just javascript and totally readable as such.

For example: https://gist.github.com/calvinmetcalf/5473022

v8 doesn't look abandoned to me: there have been 19 commits so far today to the public v8 repository. https://code.google.com/p/v8/source/list

The original team working on V8 in Aarhus switched to work on Dart, so V8 transferred ownership to a team in Munich. It is still very much alive and well :)

Google abandon javascript? You're joking, right?

Many people are doing some pretty amazing things with WebGL: http://wp.me/puh71-9M

The only amazing stuff is the distribution mechanism really. Other stuff is just plain old OpenGL but in your browser this time. It is not like it has some crazy support for raytraced voxels or something.

I personally love that OpenGL is 'plain old' haha. Not to criticise your comment at all - but as someone who's been forced to work with OpenGL 3.3-4 quite a lot recently ... it's pretty incredible at times.

Also - as I understand it, what's impressive about all this isn't just the graphics. Once you've passed vertices etc... off to the graphics pipeline then yes Javascript doesn't handle much of the load .... but as we know a lot of games are CPU bound, and the fact that Javascript is increasingly able to offer acceptable performance relative to the native compiled experience of c/c++ is pretty nuts.

> The only amazing stuff is the distribution mechanism really.

That's the main thing, but not the only thing.

WebGL is also very portable, more than other flavors of GL. Huge effort has gone into that. As a result there is a much better chance a WebGL app will give the same output on different browsers/OSes/GPUs (and if it does not, that's a bug that should be fixed).

WebGL is also more secure than OpenGL, since it was designed to run in a web browser, that executes unsafe code off the web.

> they've kind of abbonned JS in favor of Dart

Haven't they announced that they have no plans to integrate the Dart VM with the Blink rendering engine?

> I love the fact that Mozilla keeps pushing javascript to its limits.

You make it sound like they're the only ones doing this kind of thing. Anybody remember this?

www.findyourwaytooz.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com