No, I'm referring to DOM as Document Object Model.
> Things like creating or modifying elements will run at tens of millions per second on an old iPhone
Not in the DOM :)
> but fundamentally a web page is doing more work and there’s no way it’s going to match something which does less.
That's why I'm saying that the DOM is not fast. It's excruciatingly slow even for the most basic of things. It's, after all, designed to display a small static page with one or two images, and no amount of haphazard hacks that accumulated on top of it over the years will change it. It will, actually, make it much worse :)
There is a reason why the same device that can render a million of objects doing complex animations and logic in under 5ms cannot guarantee smooth animations in DOM. This is a good example: https://twitter.com/fabiospampinato/status/17495008973007301... (note: these are not complex animations and logic :) )
This is what I was talking about: you’re talking about the DOM but describing things like layout and rendering. Yes, nobody is saying that abstractions which do less won’t be faster - that’s why things like WebGL exist! – but most of the performance issues are due to things which aren’t supported in WebGL.
If you aren’t using something slow like React you could do on the order of hundreds of thousands element creations or updates per second in the mid-2010s – checking my logs, I was seeing 600k table rows added per second on Firefox in 2015 on a 2013 iMac (updates were much faster since they didn’t have as much memory allocation), and browsers and hardware have both improved since then.
To be clear, that’s never going to catch up with WebGL for the kinds of simple things you’re focused on - displaying a rectangle which doesn’t affect its peers other than transparency is a really tuned fast path with hardware acceleration – but that’s like complaining that a semi truck isn’t as fast as a Tesla. The web is centered on documents and text layout, so the better question is which one is fast enough for the kind of work you’re doing. If you need to move rectangles around, use WebGL - that’s why it exists! - but also recognize that you’re comparing unlike tools and being surprised that they’re different.
Ah yes, because layout and rendering are absolutely divorced from DOM and have nothing to do with it :)
> that’s never going to catch up with WebGL for the kinds of simple things you’re focused on - displaying a rectangle which doesn’t affect its peers other than transparency is a really tuned fast path with hardware acceleration
You will never catch up with anything. It's amazing how people keep missing the point on purpose even if they eventually almost literally repeat what I write word for word, and find no issues with that.
Here are your words: "The web is centered on documents and text layout". Yes, yes it is. And it's barely usable for that. But then we've added lots of haphazard hacks on top of it. The rest I wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39485437
And, yes, I’m not unaware that different display models have different performance characteristics. Modern browsers can run into into the millions of objects range but fundamentally a web page is doing more work and there’s no way it’s going to match something which does less. This is why there have been various ways to turn off some of the expensive work (e.g. fixed table layout) and when APIs like canvas, WebGL, and WebGPU use different designs to allow people who need more control to avoid taking on costs their apps don’t need.