I read the blog post from Impact engine creator Dominic where he shows an email he sent to John Carmack about his opinions on Javascript expressed on his keynote.

Dominic is trying to show that Javascript is not a good language to develop the next AAA game but it is awesome to make simple games and have it easily available to the world.

We have a lot of negative comments on the post (I really don’t know why) but some good ones too. One of the good comments was written by John Carmack himself!

He was just explaining his point of view about Javascript and game development, and said what we already know and is obvious (right?) that javascript is not so fast to perform some kind of tasks.

Some people are dreaming that Javascript is so fast as C in some cases but we know that it is not true for a whole game and the native version will always run faster. But you should say that the web (and the computers at all) are evolving each day, so the javascript performance, but the native version is evolving as well and javascript will always be some steps back.

John’s comment is really interesting because he knows that javascript has its benefits but he also knows that some of the real problems they are solving at Id Software will not be solved efficiently using Javascript (and a browser) as the platform.

The conclusion for the discussion is what I was expecting:

“Choose the right tool for the right job”

Are you doing a little 2D game? Try javascript, and define the platforms for it to run. But if your game really needs performance because you need to have the most impressive graphics, you need to go native.

Obviously you should choose a lot of different languages / platforms as well, you just need to decide which one is better for your business.

Use the right tool. That’s it, no silver bullet. :)