Thread: Meego is dead for good
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Radu is offline Radu
2011-10-03 , 23:53
Posts: 303 | Thanked: 146 times | Joined on Aug 2009
#61
Originally Posted by Joorin View Post
No, it takes quite a bit more to do the same thing. You need a canvas, you need font support, you need to tinker with window handling, you need a compiler and an environment for it to run in and you need to assemble all these parts to get a binary that writes "Hello world!" in a window.
Those are tools that all the C programmers that do GUI stuff already have.

That's my point. And one benefit with browser bound development is that you can do all this with a simple text editor and the "Reload" button to review the result.
Or you can do a compile and run, which is one button too (depending on your IDE). And obviously, if you use native code in your HTML5 app, doing a refresh won't do much..

I'm sure this is some ways away from the goal of HTML5.
Exactly. HTML5 has a different target and purpose (web mainly).

But as a suggestion, I'd venture to guess that streaming video will use the same native support libraries no matter if you use GTK or HTML5 for the decoding. Then you need to pay for parsing the HTML document once and then it's pretty much the same CPU cost.
Yes, streaming video is going to use native code, and it is one of the reasons why HTML5 was designed for. So that's a good use for it.

You wrote the following:
But why? How many people know C compared to HTML5? I don't see how implementing even simple applications in HTML5/JavaScript is easier than in C/C++.

This sounds very much as such a statement. But what do I know.
And if you read what I said carefully, you will notice that I did not say it would be harder. Of course, if you want to debug stuff, oh well..

That's an interesting extra requirement you just added. Why is that a given?
It is not a requirement. Notice how I used SHOULD instead of MUST.

Or it's a way to hide most of the ugly stuff via abstraction and supply most of the same functionality using the browser/rendering engine.
And it is a way to add a huge number of security issues, if you mix native code and HTML. Remember the days of ActiveX, and how many exploits were centered around it?

If this is your main argument, I do have to wonder why you ventured into arguments about how development would be done and how porting to other platforms was unlikely.
Obviously, with limited CPU resources, people generally strive for efficiency. This is why you won't see graphic intensive games, encoders, decoders, etc. done in anything but C/C++ This is why Mono is not that widely used on Linux. This is why most desktop applications are written in C/C++ and not in Java or C# (although some are written in stuff like python and other scripting languages).

And even if you're right: how does this nullify the usefulness of HTML5?
HTML5 is very useful for what it has been intended for: WEB. For other things, it's the wrong way of doing stuff.
 

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