Yeah but comparing C/SDL to JS/WebGL is unfair in terms of maturity of the platform.
JS will soon be 20 years old, but in terms of a language community, outside of jQuery plugins it's only ~5 years old.
You're not wrong, though. I can only imagine the nightmare of finding copies of all the library dependencies will be five or ten years down the road ("oh this needs jquery 1.9 but we're at jquery 5 now, and what was underscore?") not to mention the actual execution environments ("Works best in 20 versions of Chrome ago").
The web at least is a tractable problem. Did you ever have a game that you really liked that only worked in iOS 4? Tough shit.
C and SDL have changed in the last +10 years, but the old stuff still works. I invested a lot of time into getting autotools right and it looks like it really paid off :)
I don't know why the web is different, but it is, and it makes using the newest stuff a little bit uncertain.
I think the web is different because of how easy it is to roll out new features - most of the new stuff only is guaranteed to work on browsers up to a couple months old, but that's enough since people update often.
JS will soon be 20 years old, but in terms of a language community, outside of jQuery plugins it's only ~5 years old.
You're not wrong, though. I can only imagine the nightmare of finding copies of all the library dependencies will be five or ten years down the road ("oh this needs jquery 1.9 but we're at jquery 5 now, and what was underscore?") not to mention the actual execution environments ("Works best in 20 versions of Chrome ago").
The web at least is a tractable problem. Did you ever have a game that you really liked that only worked in iOS 4? Tough shit.