Question: What operations are being done on the client side that requires that much speed? Why is speed even a concern in this case? With modern hardware and the type of applications I am familiar with (rendering tens of thousands of financial data points), I could 50x lower the speed of execution and the client wouldnt even feel it. So I´m geniunly curious what people are working on that requires that much speed/performance?
This assumption is how you end up with Slack and Discord eating 100% cpu any time there's an animated gif. Something they probably don't notice on their powerful developer workstations.
You should spend more time using/working on heavy clients from a slow device since it tends to quickly answer the question. You aren't just using Brython for your one $('box').hide(). Rather, you're using it presumably because you are writing a lot of client code.
Curiously, I would say that if a frontend technology is fast then that's already improved the user-experience. If your user can click around quickly and if making a mistake isn't a huge setback in terms of time to navigate through loading screens etc.
It also gives developers a good starting point - no need to optimise if the language is just natively snappy.
But, as is usually the case, your mileage may vary depending on your use case!
I've just finished rewriting a standalone python application into a JS browser application, and runtime went from 20 minutes to 1.5s. The most important factor is that the original programmer didn't know what convolution is and that it's a linear operation, but in those 1.5s, V8 manages to run thousands of times through a 250k pixel array, convolve it, and draw it; changing the color mapping takes a mere 4ms, so it can be done with responsive controls. Python just can't do that.
Edit: this thing transpiles to JS, apparently, so it might perform.
no 50x. If you design your applications correctly with the right data structures, you rarely need all the computational power today´s machines have. In some cases, yea probably. but in most cases, hardware is already too good!
Well it seems like the clock example they have can't even hit 60 FPS without consuming 100% cpu (of one core). So yeah you probably don't want to actually use Python in the browser (via a JS interpreter).
