Why Mobile Web Apps Are Slow

-
Great articled on Sealed Abstract on this. Go read the whole thing - its long (10K words!), but completely absolutely worth it.
The conclusion is fairly straightforward (and depressing)
So here’s what you should remember:
  • Javascript is too slow for mobile app use in 2013 (e.g., for photo editing etc.).  
  • It’s slower than native code by about 5
  • It’s comparable to IE8
  • It’s slower than x86 C/C++ by about 50
  • It’s slower than server-side Java/Ruby/Python/C# by a factor of about 10 if your program fits in 35MB, and it degrades exponentially from there
  • The most viable path for it to get faster is by pushing the hardware to desktop-level performance.  This might be viable long-term, but it’s looking like a pretty long wait.
  • The language itself doesn’t seem to be getting faster these days, and people who are working on it are saying that with the current language and APIs, it will never be as fast as native code
  • Garbage collection is exponentially bad in a memory-constrained environment.  It is way, way worse than it is in desktop-class or server-class environments.
  • Every competent mobile developer, whether they use a GCed environment or not, spends a great deal of time thinking about the memory performance of the target device
  • JavaScript, as it currently exists, is fundamentally opposed to even allowing developers to think about the memory performance of the target device
  • If they did change their minds and allowed developers to think about memory, experience suggests this is a technically hard problem.
  • asm.js show some promise, but even if they win you will be using C/C++ or similar “backwards” language as a frontend, rather than something dynamic like JavaScript

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her
Read more

Cannonball Tree!

-
Image
Spotted this one just outside the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore .  Its called the Cannonball Tree , but is - technically (i.e., in Latin, if thats your metier) - Couroupita Guianensis , or ನಾಗಲಿಂಗ ಪುಷ್ಪಾ  in Kannada. The fruits look like Cannonballs (well, d-uh), and the flowers are really quite amazing, and pretty ludicrously distinctive...
Read more

Visualizing Prime Numbers

-
Image
From Jason Davies , we have El Patron de Los Primos , probably one of the coolest prime number visualizer that I've seen.  For every Natural number, he draws a periodic curve that intersects at that number and each of its multiples.  Needless to say, prime numbers are touched by only two curves (itself and 1 ). You can scroll to the right, and move up the prime food change. (The image above is a screen grab.  Go here to see the actual thing)
Read more