There are situations where bubble-sort is adequate, too, but it's still not a good idea to use it or claim that it performing badly reflects on the implementation language. The code uses an explicit stack in place of recursion, sure, but that's not particularly salient; it's just recursion without stack overflow.
The code allocates data structures at least eight times per pixel, and tests pixels at least four times. It will perform badly in all languages and so cannot be used as a reliable indication of JS/Canvas performance.
agreed, except that the reason it's never a good idea to use bubble sort is that insertion sort is just as simple and always performs much better; there are cases where insertion sort really is the right thing to use despite its usually quadratic performance
there might even be a case where the single-loop sort is the right thing to use, despite its abominable performance, because it's simpler than bubble sort or insertion sort; i think it's 12 amd64 instructions, 40 bytes
for (i = 1; i < n; i++)
if (a[i-1] > a[i]) t = a[i], a[i] = a[i-1], a[i-1] = t, i = 0;
The code allocates data structures at least eight times per pixel, and tests pixels at least four times. It will perform badly in all languages and so cannot be used as a reliable indication of JS/Canvas performance.