> Moore's Law should apply, and eventually processing power should catch up. I think we'll see the 2MB limit removed by 1997/1998.
That's a nice summary on the quality on web technologies.
2009: "Hey guys, we can now draw on a widget; we called it Canvas!"
2011: "Wow, look at this cool OpenGL wrapper that locks up your system in ways VoodooFX didn't manage to do in 1998! But you can use it on your web site, which is what people want, right, guys?"
Yeah, I find this stuff depressing. I see people jumping up and down over a demo of the Unreal-1 engine running at 0.04 fps in javascript and I think to myself, if my old compaq POS from the late nineties could run that engine without trouble, why can't my brand new Macbook do better, or at least the same?
It feels like we've redefined "progress" to mean "the same thing as 20 years ago, but worse"
More like the same thing as 20 years ago, but the dominant language is a LIS.. I mean a Schem... I mean it's a bit like Self.. look, it has garbage collection, a JIT, supports objects and goes somewhat fast. Oh, and it's used to drive a GUI made up of stringly-typed ... things that kind of looks like SGML and has no chance in hell of achieving good draw performance. But you can calculate fibonacci in CSS and get even worse performance than doing it at compile-time with C++ templates!
WebGL puts in heroic amounts of effort (and many performance compromises) into working around 3D driver bugs and trying to bring about a memory-safe 3D programming environment that still leverages 3D acceleration. Blame the system lockups on buggy drivers, and systemic problems in GPU software stacks, not "web technologies".
That's a nice summary on the quality on web technologies.
2009: "Hey guys, we can now draw on a widget; we called it Canvas!"
2011: "Wow, look at this cool OpenGL wrapper that locks up your system in ways VoodooFX didn't manage to do in 1998! But you can use it on your web site, which is what people want, right, guys?"