Posted by gouessej on Mar 06, 2011; 2:43pm
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/WebGL-specification-1-0-is-final-and-also-WebCL-tp2631673p2641910.html

The situation with Java was really different as Java has been used in video games since 1995 despite the silly trolls about its slowness. Java is able to run 3D games faster than C/C++ since 2004. Java and C/C++ are both strongly typed languages whereas JavaScript isn't such a language. As some researchers in IBM said, Java is able to be faster than C/C++ because it is precompiled and interpreted, it benefits of optimizations that are not possible in purely compiled languages. JavaScript is slower than Java even with Rhino... Therefore, comparing current JavaScript situation to Java in the nineties is absurd in my humble opinion. JavaScript drives the interpretation more complicated, I don't see any chance of getting better performance than Java in this case, really.

I have nothing against scripting languages but I don't encourage people to write softwares only with them. It is better to use them where they give some interesting possibilities, for example to ease the customizations of existing applications at runtime, for AI, etc... Scripting languages are more accessible for people who are not true full-time programmers.

I don't target only very expensive smartphones with very high end GPUs and dual core CPUs. The HTC Dream G1 is slower than my Celeron 700 Mhz. I want to support such machines, I would like to get a steady frame rate with a single core and 250 Mhz as a minimal clock frequency. Machines become faster as time goes by, it does not mean that we have to waste some CPU time in using solutions that lack optimizations. If Java was really slow, I would not use it. Quake 2 can work fine on a Nintendo 64 with 4 MB of RAM and 100 Mhz. I think that doing the same in Java is possible in term of speed, Jake 2 port to JavaScript is about 3 times slower, that is not what I'm looking for.

WebGL will be an answer for lots of projects in 2D and 3D as it is seducing, it requires no plugin, it is fast enough for a lot of applications (not all). It depends on what you really want to do. Honestly, I'm an outsider, only a very few people still want to support very low end machines with only OpenGL 1.2, my opinion is not representative. Lots of programmers prefer telling you that your hardware is not good enough instead of admitting that their tools are not fast enough. If WebGL fits better in your needs than JOGL, use it but I have to warn you about the limitations of these technologies.

I don't like Oracle but the plugin 3 is strangely the only excellent sign of interest for the client side that it has given since it controls Sun Microsystems. In my humble opinion, the bad reputation of Java has been caused by Microsoft with its crappy very slow VM and Java on Android is becoming more interesting with the JIT compiler (it still lacks on optimizations in comparison with J2SE For Embedded).

Lol, I have seen projects whose LWJGL renderer is twice slower than its JOGL equivalent