> people build high performance applications like games in JS
Yes, and in my experience this kind of applications (and the browser in general) are one of the only things these days that still push me to upgrade my hardware to have better CPUs and more RAM, as it's perfectly sufficient as is for pretty much everything else I do.
You can’t tell from the outside if you are running a well engineered JS app that would have been fast in another platform, or a non-optimized JS app. My point was that it’s not fundamentally impossible to write fast enough JS code for a game, even though you may come across many slow JS apps regularly. (Not surprising, given the wide distribution and low barrier to entry of the web.)
Yes, you can operate strictly on typed arrays and essentially implement something alike a virtual machine inside your JS code to make it handle memory efficiently, so you're right - it's not "fundamentally impossible", but are you still really writing JavaScript at that point? :P
Yes, and in my experience this kind of applications (and the browser in general) are one of the only things these days that still push me to upgrade my hardware to have better CPUs and more RAM, as it's perfectly sufficient as is for pretty much everything else I do.