Top all-time · #7173
Joel Webber
Personal blog · j15r.comprogramminggames
Joel Webber writes JoelgraysonwebbeR, a personal blog at j15r.com about programming and games. Since 2013, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “Box2D C/JS/NaCl/Java/Dart performance comparison”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Joel Webber's posts as benchmark evidence on JavaScript performance, including asm.js and Box2d tests, and as advice on game development in Go, avoiding GC and managing memory layout.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Engineer, drummer, cofounder @fullstory.com, occasional game developer.
Most-linked posts?
- Box2D C/JS/NaCl/Java/Dart performance comparison4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-07-09
- Box2d Revisited3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-04-25
- Game Development in Go3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-01-26
What Hacker News says?
Well written article, but I have a few comments: 1. This is about JS speed. How important is JS speed in mobile apps, compared to rendering for example? That's the crucial question here, and I don't see any numbers on it. Rendering, after all, should be the same speed as a native app. 2. "Nothing terribly important has happened to CPU-bound JavaScript lately" - picking some benchmarks where there has been little cha…
Comment linking /blog/2013/07/05/Box2d_Addendum
on “Why mobile web apps are slow”Submitted Game Development in Go as a story · 132 points
HN discussionSo I wondered that as well and did some Googling. Found a blog post by Joel Webber, who I have not heard of, but he was working on a minecraft clone and had some advice on avoiding GC and memory layout: http://www.j15r.com/blog/2015/01/25/Game_Development_in_Go Also found an engine, Azul 3D, and they made this claim: https://azul3d.org/doc/faq.html#what-about-the-garbage-colle... Then there is termloop, which is a t…
Comment linking /blog/2015/01/25/Game_Development_in_Go
on “The State of Go: Where we are in February 2016”Submitted Box2d Revisited as a story · 67 points
HN discussionI think Javascript is too slow for 3d gaming. If you look at this HTML5/WebGL minecraft engine, it stutters even without any other players or bots in the environment. http://voxeljs.com/#gallery Meanwhile Minecraft running in Java is smooth on even the slowest machines. Benchmarks indicate that Javascript is 4x slower than Java. http://j15r.com/blog/2013/07/05/Box2d_Addendum The alternatives like ASM.js and PNACL ar…
Comment linking /blog/2013/07/05/Box2d_Addendum
on “Artillery is building a hardcore RTS with HTML5 and WebGL”Submitted Game Development in Go as a story · 11 points
HN discussionI think the above poster is talking about UX... > 3. It works on mobile devices, flash doesn't. False. Many (120000+) Flash apps are actively running with Adobe AIR on App Store and Google Play. AIR is a technology to package SWF as a native app. > 4. The tools are out there. Check out appcelerator or unity's tools. Unity can not export for HTML5 yet. Apparently they are working on it but I don't think it's that eas…
Comment linking /blog/2013/07/05/Box2d_Addendum
on “On Asm.js”Submitted Box2D C/JS/NaCl/Java/Dart performance comparison as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFPS really depends on which browser you are on. Since you mentioned Java, note that in some cases JavaScript with asm.js can be faster, for example http://j15r.com/blog/2013/04/25/Box2d_Revisited
Comment linking /blog/2013/04/25/Box2d_Revisited
on “Unreal JavaScript”Submitted A Palatable Javascript Pattern as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Dart is no more an attempt to replace the web with a walled garden than GWT is (which is what I work on). It is a tool, like Typescript, like CoffeeScript, like ClojureScript, like Emscripten. There's no "plan" to create a lock-in walled garden based around programming language. Regarding the Dart language, I agree fully. It's another option like the ones you mentioned. They all generate JS, and since we have pret…
Comment linking /blog/2013/07/05/Box2d_Addendum
on “How serious is Google about Dart?”Well, it does. 33%: http://j15r.com/blog/2013/04/25/Box2d_Revisited
Comment linking /blog/2013/04/25/Box2d_Revisited
on “Blink, PNaCl, And Standards ”The points all sound reasonable. I wonder about the details though, for example > Dart is dynamically typed (or at least, types are optional and the VM doesn't care about them), but types are of a fixed shape. If programmers can tolerate fixed-shape types, Dart provides a very nice dynamic language that still can achieve the same optimizations as statically-typed Java or statically-compiled C/++. Again, the principl…
Comment linking /blog/2013/07/05/Box2d_Addendum
on “On Languages, VMs, Optimization, and the Way of the World”But asm.js (and WebAssembly) runs faster than Flash. See a couple of different benchmarks from 2013 ( http://www.j15r.com/blog/2013/04/25/Box2d_Revisited ) and from 2014 ( http://www.infognition.com/blog/2014/comparing_flash_haxe_da... ). asm.js also outperformed Dalvik in 2013: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2013/08/01/staring-at-th... Here's Unity's recent benchmark of WebGL and asm.js to see how performance…
Comment linking /blog/2013/04/25/Box2d_Revisited
on “A look at asm.js and the future with WebAssembly”