You know you can do concurrency without async calls? Async isn't a good solution for loading data in a data heavy application, game engines doesn't do it that way and they are the most data heavy applications you can find.
Game engines are not as dependent on the network as web browsers. Usually they do all the disk I/O up front, are designed to drop events if the network goes bad, drop frames instead of hang if deadlines are missed. It’s like your compiler just skips an import if it the disk is slow.
You’re talking about very simple games here. Open world games are constantly streaming huge amounts of data, much more so than a browser, at much tighter timing limitations.
What more complex games do (simplified) is put file IO on one thread, network IO on another, and use async (worker threads with jobs) for the rest.
> Game engines are not as dependent on the network as web browsers
You do know that web browsers aren't implemented in Electron either and that they don't use javascript to load the resources of a web page concurrently?
You were talking about why Electron/Javascript/Node.js rules all. I'm not aware of any web browser implemented in those technologies. I know Electron is based on chromium, meaning they used a browser to implement it, but I am talking about the other way around ie implementing a browser in Electron.
Electron embeds a web browser, which is a highly complex asynchronous application which is written in C++ by one of only a handful of super high tech companies. It is notorious that efforts to make web browsers with other runtimes (e.g. Hotjava) have failed.
The web browser is async from top to bottom so it never blocks when loading possibly hundreds of resources that make up a web page. JavaScript is asynchronous so it can be embedded in the web browser, if it wasn’t it could lock the whole thing up.
I looked at what the options were for cross-platform guis written by applications programmers and they were not pretty, had serious warts, and all went out for long lunch breaks.
Pretty sure that browsers loads resources in one dedicated thread just like complicated games do. It is a solid and simple technique to implement in C++, there are many good tools to handle that. That isn't the hard part of making a browser, the hard part is implementing all the different file formats/videos, rendering and scripting engine, security etc.
