A lot of these apps wouldn't exist if they couldn't have been built quickly and cheaply.
http://www.chipworks.com/media/wpmu/uploads/blogs.dir/2/file...
You see those little dots? Those are individual silicon atoms from one of a few fins in the gate on Intel's 22nm node.
Also, I Am A C Programmer. I Think Everything Should Be Written In C. C Is Close To The Hardware And Is Faster And Use Less Resource Compared To The JavaSlow and WebKittenz and CSS. But I Like CSS Because It Has C In It. I Am A C Programmer.
Get back to me when we have compressed ZRAM implementations and Same Page Merging everywhere to save memory on each Chrome process and each JS interpreter instance. Don't you want to do the green thing?
When chips started hitting the limits of the photo-lithography process, they switched to lasers, UV, DUV, and now EUV. Transistors start leaking so they redesign them time and time again. We've gone from completely 2D Circuts to 2 layer 3D to what's it at now 16 layers? The end is nigh and has been since Moore came up with that god damn law.
My point is that there's a lot a really brilliant people in the field who've been working for years if not decades to address problems we haven't even had yet. We're perpetually on the verge of a crisis, and simultaneously on the verge of a solution to said crisis.
We're in an age of ridiculously powerful machines that we don't know what to do with. If suddenly all progress halted in chip development and we had to make due, we'd probably enter into an age of hyper optimization where software engineers would be scrutinizing every clock cycle furthering the annual performance gains we've had for the last 40+ years.
that's not a valid argument when we're talking about running out of atoms to work with
At 4nm no amount of dielectric will save you from the quantum tunneling.
Those people are working on EUV at ASML. Those are the next generation processes. What you're suggesting is they have some super science quantum-tunneling barrier that the world has never heard of nor seen nor thought could exist.
"probably right" is probably enough.
Also, even if native apps were "more expensive", that's only from the developers' perspective -- and for a good app, the number of users far outnumbers its developers, so any "increased resource consumption" gets foisted on and effectively multplied by all the users. Only the developers get any benefit from this; but even then, since developers are themselves users, if they use apps that others have similarly developed with this culture of "selfishness", they get to experience the "increased resource consumption" too. In the end, I don't think this vicious cycle of waste benefits anyone except the hardware manufacturers.
In general, I think treating resources like they're infinite and "there will always be more" is almost certainly guaranteed to make it so there won't ever be enough.
This Firefox.html is a fun experiment to push boundaries, like WebKit.js and all the other interesting things you can do with JS and an HTML rendering engine (e.g. see Fabrice Bellard's complete PC emulator in a browser), and somewhat reminds me of other tricks like nesting VMs.
> it's likely much more expensive to code native apps