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Comment by ndnichols | Hacker News Reader

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ndnichols·

Q: "Are mobile web apps slow?"

A: "A web app's CPU budget is spent in three different buckets"

Q: "That... doesn't answer my question."

A: "Javascript is the puppet master of the browser engine."

Q: "That doesn't either."

A: "I'm the director of engineering for the Web Platform team at Adobe. I sort of have to write blog posts like this."

Q: "Ah, ok. No hard feelings then. You're in a tough spot."

A: "Yes. Yes, I am."

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> Are mobile web apps slow?

A meaningless question. Slow relative to what? Slow for whom? What sort of app are we talking about?

You're able to infer the answer to all those questions.

Relative to native. Slow for users. A typical non-super-dynamic app. Use common sense.

No, it doesn't answer the question, it suggests more questions to ask to make an informed answer. It's just a short cautionary tale to make the user consider what type of app he/she is building, and to consider if significant activity within the app is, or not, likely part of the GC/JavaScript (or HTML/CSS) that would suffer in some cases vs local, native, code.

Personally, I tend to agree with the original article that GC is an expensive thing to put in most apps. BUT, you need to be pragmatic about determining if the additional margin of execution speed from not having a GC justifies the coding effort.

Having said that... you're right in that mostly this posting is to fulfill somebody's job requirements, rather than a substantial amount of content :-)

You mean "how'd that link get upvoted?" yeah..

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