Read this really interesting performance analysis of various browser programming languages
Two things that come out of this.
The first is the power of meta-programming languages like Haxe. Using a better programming language and a typeless goop as your target machine-language can deliver great performance. Not entirely surprising – of course – because hardware is un-typed 🙂
I first encountered Haxe four years ago as an answer to my prayers around the mess of Php and Javascript inflicting typeless chaos on the world of web programming.
We actually used Haxe at Zynga to write a renderer if memory serves me write and got better performance than we could have if we had written it in entirely in Flash.
The second is how underwhelming the performance of emscrimpten is compared to Haxe when you don’t have asm.js. There was a time before the mobile web died that I though that C++ to JS would be important. Now that it’s clear that the mobile web is deader than a door knob, the value of Javascript as a front-end mobile programming language is trending to zero fast.