Grok the GIL (opensource.com)

Slightly orthogonal issue: it seems ridiculous to have client-side computation for something that will compute exactly the same result on every client's machine. Why not do the syntax highlighting once on the server and serve the result to everybody, saving their battery life and cutting an iota from the page latency?

Except that Hipster 2.0 sites - those that use JavaScript for everything, which is where this ends up - don't tend to gracefully degrade, instead leaving a jumble of elements or even a blank page since the text and graphics aren't able to glide in smoothly from off the sides of the screen without scripts activated (or whatever special effect it is that is inevitably needed to spice up the ten to twenty words of actual content). On my rather old machine, such animations are wasted anyway: by the time the browser has woken up to the task of animating, the end of the animation timeline is upon it, and it might as well just put things in their final positions.

Also, while I'm impressed with things like PDF.js, I find myself using a native viewer like Okular for documents of any size, purely because the performance difference is significant. So, JavaScript-based equivalent solutions certainly have their limitations.