"40-60fps on phones, tablets, PCs..."
>klicks a button
>site doesn't react for 2 minutes
>laggy background animation
>on i7 2.7GHz Laptop (AC adapter plugged in)
Either I'm missing something, or this is absolutely ridiculous.
The performance problem is because of the abstraction level, we're too far away from the metal with DOM/JavaScript. This can't be solved with JavaScript.
I would try a hard refresh, it's pretty snappy for me (stock Macbook Air and iPhone 5). It's always been really impressively performant, ever since I heard about it some months ago.
Yes, I'm aware of that, but at soon as you interact with the DOM, a canvas, etc, you reintroduce all the overhead that you wanted to circumvent with compilation. And JavaScript without DOM interaction is rarely useful in a browser. For node.js, on the other hand, it sure is awesome. I didn't want to imply that JavaScript itself is necessarily slow, it isn't.
Well, DOM and the canvas elements empirically are somewhat slow, but there's no inherent reason that makes them slow. Besides, if we're talking about something like a game, you can draw the final output to the canvas at a single step which is not the bottleneck.
Either I'm missing something, or this is absolutely ridiculous. The performance problem is because of the abstraction level, we're too far away from the metal with DOM/JavaScript. This can't be solved with JavaScript.