The Mighty pushback isn't all about Mighty
Two months ago, Mighty launched with its plan to “reignite the future of desktop computing”. This vision of the future got a lot of pushback.
Venture capitalist and Mighty backer Paul Graham wrote an thinly-veiled response, Crazy New Ideas, in which he argues that Mighty’s critics are stuck in a conventional way of thinking. This is true for some of Mighty’s critics, but there are others who are instead raging against the status quo of bad web performance. For them, this fight isn't really about Mighty.
There’s a faction of developers – many of whom make games – who love to talk about how bad modern web performance is. (For what it’s worth, I largely agree with this crowd even though I work on web stuff.) When you look at what they do, it’s easy to see why. Game developers push hardware to its limits: they’re rendering high resolution frames with hundreds of thousands to millions of triangles, with enormous textures, with complex lighting, with all sorts of post-processing – and they’re often doing this for 60+ frames every second.
To hit these targets, game developers need to have a strong understanding of computer architecture, and they need to have access to their hardware at a low level. They optimize data layout on disk to make reads faster, and they pack data in memory as densely as possible to minimize cache misses.
