Crawford: Why mobile web apps are slow
On his blog, Drew Crawford analyzes the performance of mobile web apps to determine why they are slow compared to native apps, and what the future holds for their performance as CPU and JavaScript runtime speeds increase. Short summary of a long article: he is not optimistic that performance will improve significantly any time soon for a number of reasons. "Of the people who actually do relevant work: the view that JS in particular, or dynamic languages in general, will catch up with C, is very much the minority view. There are a few stragglers here and there, and there is also no real consensus what to do about it, or if anything should be done about it at all. But as to the question of whether, from a language perspective, in general, the JITs will catch up–the answer from the people working on them is 'no, not without changing either the language or the APIs.'" (Thanks to Sebastian Kügler.)