anotherthrwaway

Get used to these kinds of comments. There's a large contingent of people on HN who don't understand that higher level languages (say, Java) are not a complete replacement for C/C++. The same people are behind the "HTML5+Javascript ought to be enough for anybody" mentality.

Yes, but no UDP sockets, which are absolutely essential for multiplayer games. It's ludicrous that a modern networking platform can forgo this essential component.

Exactly. People think that because we can have some completely unimaginative stuff with ideas from the 1980's that HTML5 is ready to be the future of browser gaming. And then when presented with the problem of complex physics, the solution is of course to add a special extension to browsers to handle physics. It's no wonder the browser is decades behind the desktop with myopic thinking like this.

This is the wrong mindset. Just because you can implemented some specialised idea of video games that dates back more than a decade is nothing to be optimistic about. What about the next innovative idea? There are some things you need raw CPU power for.

HTML and JavaScript are a real step backward for getting games into the browser. Instead of having a bytecode (or virtualisation of machine code) that is designed for efficiency we get big APIs to do specific things thrown into the browser. Then everyone gets excited because the browser can finally do what the desktop has been able to do for years (without all the ludicrous overhead). But what about the applications that need raw CPU power? There's an unimaginative attitude these days that says that because we can implement some obvious-in-retrospect demo (like all these games are) that there's no need for efficiency. The design of the browser does a real disservice to programming.