IMHO it’s in part because of what I assume are different business models between a game like GTA and many / most businesses where a website / web app is core to their product.

Different business models result in different environments in which to conduct software engineering; different constraints and requirements.

IMHO constant and unpredictable change (which I assume happens less for games like GTA) is one of the big differences, as is the relationship between application performance and profit.

But I like what you’re saying and would love to see that world.

How long does it take to start up GTA V on your computer?

More than a website that preloads its structure into the cache and then transfers blocks of 280 characters, a name & a small avatar, rather than gigabytes worth of compressed textures.

Is the difference because GTA has more "readable" code?

I have other games that do load up quicker than Twitter, which I do think is damning, but it's not really the point I'm trying to get across here.

Well, the "less readable code"—ie, the goddamn mess that a lot of game code is, slapped together barely under deadline by staffs working 80 or more hours a week—is part of why AAA games like GTA have so many massive bugs requiring patches immediately after release.

But then, you brought up GTA and games, which aren't even apples and oranges with a website. Websites—even the Twitter website—don't require GPUs or dedicated memory, they don't have the advantage of pulling everything from the local hard drive, and yet they actually work as designed, not merely in a low-resolution, low-effects mode on computers more than a couple years old.

And while I wouldn't point out the Twitter home page as remotely fast for a web site, have you actually even looked at it recently? It shows a lot more than just a few tweets and avatars. It's got images, embedded video, etc.

This is a dumb argument. My point is that readable doesn't imply slow, and "readability" is not actually the reason slow things are slow, most of the time. I don't think you even disagree with me.

There's definitely another discussion to be had about why web tech is so disastrously slow given what computers are capable of, but it's not worth having here. We're never going to settle that one, and regardless if you are a web guy, you're stuck with JS.

>It's got images, embedded video, etc.

Bad excuse IMO. Lazy load them.

I don't have 8GB RAM to dedicate just to Twitter.

GTA V has graphics card requirements that, I suspect, may be quite large compared to Twitter. Although it is worth noting that GPU acceleration in the browser is increasingly a thing: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/upgrade-graphics-driver...

That being said, I don't think it addresses the problems with client side applications, although it may allow more complex ones.

Websites like Twitter are not render bottlenecked. Even a software rendered game from decades ago like doom is doing more on the screen than Twitter.