JavaScript is a mature and sophisticated language with many syntax features, tools, standard library features, and more. It helps keep code clear with separated concerns, and helps make it easy to re-use code and third-party libraries across projects. JavaScript Modules provide a useful way to write code in isolated modules, only importing and exporting what they need. It's a great benefit to more experienced coders though, providing a wide range of tools to help you best express what you want to do, and ensuring you can go a long way without running in to limitations or missing features. While JavaScript has a great many language features, beginners can pretty much just ignore the more advanced parts, so this should not have any impact on how easy it is to learn the language basics. The standardisation process also helps ensure features are designed well, with thorough reviews from technical experts across the industry. However JavaScript still has many major features that are limited or entirely missing in GML. In theory a single organisation could move quicker. New JavaScript features go through a rigorous standardisation process, where proposals are thoroughly reviewed and consensus achieved before implementing and releasing them. So overall JavaScript should be just as easy to learn, but offer a much better path onwards in future. Learning a language only used by one tool throws extra hurdles in your way if you want to go further, having to learn the new aspects of an industry-standard language, and unlearn the quirks and bad habits that you may have picked up with the the previous language. Further there are schools, colleges, coding "bootcamps" and other educational institutions that include teaching JavaScript coding, providing more options to learn in the wider world.įinally JavaScript is a highly transferrable skill, being widely used in industry both in browsers and on servers, and with plenty of jobs available around the world for a promising career. There are free coding tutorials and learning resources for it all across the web, such as the MDN Learn JavaScript guide and The Modern JavaScript tutorial, some also with interactive samples where you can edit and run the code. Just take a look at the code samples for IsPrime above - the syntax is pretty close, and so it's likely both are about equally approachable for beginners.īeing such a widely-used language, JavaScript has several advantages for beginner learners though. They're both languages with a C-like syntax, a dynamic type system, and garbage collection to simplify memory management. However the fundamentals of GML and JavaScript are very similar. One reason sometimes cited to develop a separate language is to customise it to be easy for beginners to learn. This test result shows that if you want peak performance, choose JavaScript. Many games run intensive code for purposes like pathfinding, bullet hell games, and more, and high performance is key to maintaining a smooth framerate no matter what your player is battling through. So Construct's event blocks are no slouch either. In intensive benchmarks like this, the event system has quite a high performance overhead compared to text-based programming languages since it's essentially interpreted by JavaScript code despite this, thanks to JavaScript's extreme performance it ends up surprisingly close to the C++ code compiled by YYC, and also far ahead of the VM interpreter. In fact, JavaScript is so fast that even our equivalent made in Construct's drag-and-drop event block system clocks in relatively close to the result for the YYC. However this still proves the point that JavaScript is super fast with straightforward, idiomatic code, and you don't need to resort to time-consuming experimentation and research to get an excellent result. Perhaps there are some obscure tricks or performance hacks that can improve the result somewhat for GML. And all this raw performance comes for free with the very browser you're reading this in! It just starts running with an interpreter right away, compiles code in the background, and then switches over to it as soon as it's ready - all of which happens surprisingly quickly. Further, JavaScript JITs are also tuned for fast startup, so there's no need to sit around waiting for code to compile. JavaScript is not just 10% or 20% faster, but several times faster. This also dispels the myth that just because something is compiled to C++ it's fast. Modern JavaScript JIT (just-in-time) compilers are incredibly sophisticated and have been fine-tuned by entire teams of dedicated engineers at the biggest tech companies for years. Even if you pay for a GameMaker subscription and use YYC to compile to native code, it still comes out over 5x slower. The VM proves much slower - in fact, over 40x slower. JavaScript is far faster than GML on this test.
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