Why Mobile Web Apps Are Slow
This whole long article by Drew Crawford is worth reading, but here are some interesting nuggets:
The thing is, JITing JavaScript was a 60-year old idea with 60 years of research, and literally thousands of implementations for every conceivable programming language demonstrating that it was a good idea. But now that we’ve done it, we’ve run out of 60-year-old ideas. That’s all, folks. Show’s over. Maybe we can grow another good idea in the next 60 years.
But at any rate, what I can tell you, from publicly available information, is that Apple’s claims of 3.8x faster whatever does not necessarily translate into anything useful to you. I can also tell you that if I had benchmarks that refuted Apple’s claims of beating Chrome, I would not be allowed to publish them.
What this chart says is “As long as you have about 6 times as much memory as you really need, you’re fine [with garbage collection]. But woe betide you if you have less than 4x the required memory.”
There are also some good comments on Hacker News.
