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WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

robert.ocallahan.org

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Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#351

Post by acdha »

fixermark wrote: post #291
acdha wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As people have pointed out, that's Chrome-only at the moment but that's also a big moving of the goal-posts. Your original comment was “far behind in a variety of features that are useful to a much bigger % of the web” — precisely how much user-visible benefit do you think comes from a feature which may accelerate the first load slightly? If that was that critical, it'd be easy to point to e.g. webpagetest.org traces…

How much user-visible benefit? Do a quick text search of this Hacker News thread for people talking about Firefox "feeling" slower than Chrome. Preload is a big underlying "why" of that experience.

Again, do you have any firm data supporting the assertion that this form of network prefetching is so critical?

I've read many comments where people mention performance in ways suggesting they have issues with UI performance, launch time, extensions, etc. Optimizing cold-cache performance the first time someone visits a site won't help with that at all.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#352

Post by braveo »

NiLSPACE wrote: post #170
braveo wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these category of bugs a constant problem in FF?

Some of these bugs could've been prevented with Rust: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2017-0...

That isn't what I asked, I asked if this class of problem is truly causing a lot of harm.

Software stabilizes over time, you find problems and then you fix them. How often are these class of bugs causing catastrophic issues?

That's really the important question.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#353

Post by braveo »

wpietri wrote: post #319
2bitencryption wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if using Chrome meant you needed to step on three kittens a day, I think I would agree with you. but it's just browser preference, so the whole "moral" thing factors in less than whatever logo is printed on the pen I take from the junk drawer. I just want a pen that works.

One of those words that is often a tell is "just". That's where people sweep a lot of things under the rug. Including here, where you've hidden the fact that you made an unsupported assertion that assumes an answer to the question we're discussing. I'll note that it's a different bad argument, one about consumer choice, than the one I was addressing, which was about business choices. But consumer choices too always h…

I'm going to have to agree with 2bitencryption here.

Everything is a "moral choice" when the person demanding the choice feels strongly about it, but that typically means you just lack perspective.

At the end of the day we're talking about browsers and websites, and while people may not LIKE it, when a business writes software it's a business decision as to whether or not they'll target all browsers or a subset.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#354

Post by braveo »

hinkley wrote: post #264
braveo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's purely a business decision.

Firefox got big in large part because they had good developer tools long before anyone else did. I worked several places where management would say things like, "don't waste time, we only need this to work in IE". The developers would nod and go right back to creating in Mozilla and then fixing it in IE after, because it was faster. In that way there was a quiet revolution toward cross browser support.

And yet, the decision to target a specific browser is STILL a business decision.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#355

Post by braveo »

wutbrodo wrote: post #280
blazespin wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a business decision, and the right decision is not to allow for monoculture to develop.

This is just flat inaccurate. Given the GP comments' premise of optimizing only for the business's direct interests, the expected value of your contribution against monoculture is so negligible that it won't balance out changing damn near any habit that you had already chosen. It's a pretty basic collective action problem; if you're optimizing for yourself and your business alone, ignoring the wider picture is still…

That's not at all what I said.

It's a business decision.

That's it. I didn't say we should optimize for direct bottom-line business interests. I said IT IS A BUSINESS DECISION.

It is not the decision of the developers unless the BUSINESS GIVES THEM THE ABILITY TO CHOOSE.

And even in THAT, it's a business decision.

That's all I said. The business that pays for the labor and chooses the direction they go in.

This idea that a business targetting a specific browser is some horrible social problem is silly. If I'm making a product that's meant to sit in a kiosk running Chrome OS, I'm sure as shit not going to pay for FF and Edge support. If I get it on accident, fine, but if something breaks in FF I'm not putting any effort in fixing it.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#356

Post by sitkack »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #95
scriptproof wrote: post #7

Asm.js was a brillant idea, but wasm is more like a bytecode. This is where is the part from NaCl the author missed. Wasm is derived from asm.js but also an improvement on LLVM to make a portable bytecode, that LLVM is not. One more step in the LLVM toolchain to get portability...

WASM isn't based on LLVM. WASM is a compiler target, but compilers other than LLVM can target WASM.

And WASM is now the defacto portable Bitcode. Just as JS took over the world, so will WASM. In six months, WASM will have had more program launches than the totality of .Net and the JVM.

We have yet to fathom how far reaching WASM will be. Did I say WASM enough times? I end with only this. WASM.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#357

Post by ZenoArrow »

sitkack wrote: post #356
ZenoArrow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WASM isn't based on LLVM. WASM is a compiler target, but compilers other than LLVM can target WASM.

And WASM is now the defacto portable Bitcode. Just as JS took over the world, so will WASM. In six months, WASM will have had more program launches than the totality of .Net and the JVM. We have yet to fathom how far reaching WASM will be. Did I say WASM enough times? I end with only this. WASM.

> "In six months, WASM will have had more program launches than the totality of .Net and the JVM."

I don't think so. The only languages that can currently target WASM are languages that don't need GC. It'll take a while before the tooling and functionality is mature enough to support the most commonly used languages (aside from C/C++).

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#358

Post by j45 »

jhpriestley wrote: post #266

People seem way too optimistic about web assembly. The elephant in the room is download size. A wasm photoshop, even if it works and performs well, is still a multi-gigabyte "web page". The browser is in no way set up to handle that. Even simple things will be huge compared to javascript webpage. Let's say you write your todo app in Python with Qt bindings. Sure, wasm lets you run it on the web. You'll just have to s…

It's understandable if the excitement around wasm seems pre-mature.

While it seems early, I can't count many web standards that Microsoft, Google, Mozilla agreed on running the same way.

Javascript was hindered for many years because of this, and wasm, while young appears to be getting through this much faster.

I disagree with the notion that wasm, or any other tech will be a failure because it can't succeed at being all, or nothing.

There's a lot of problems that aren't being solved in the browser that will now start to become possible.

Unity games can be compiled directly to wasm, and it's still early: http://webassembly.org/demo/Tanks/

The abilty to create rich experiences that are code once, deploy everywhere sans browser interpretations is a big deal.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#359

Post by wpietri »

braveo wrote: post #353
wpietri wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of those words that is often a tell is "just". That's where people sweep a lot of things under the rug. Including here, where you've hidden the fact that you made an unsupported assertion that assumes an answer to the question we're discussing. I'll note that it's a different bad argument, one about consumer choice, than the one I was addressing, which was about business choices. But consumer choices too always h…

I'm going to have to agree with 2bitencryption here. Everything is a "moral choice" when the person demanding the choice feels strongly about it, but that typically means you just lack perspective. At the end of the day we're talking about browsers and websites, and while people may not LIKE it, when a business writes software it's a business decision as to whether or not they'll target all browsers or a subset.

By all means, keep on asserting things without demonstrating them and ignoring arguments and examples to the contrary. It doesn't actually convince, but I'm sure it makes you feel better.

Re: WebAssembly: Mozilla Won

#360

Post by braveo »

wpietri wrote: post #359
braveo wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to have to agree with 2bitencryption here. Everything is a "moral choice" when the person demanding the choice feels strongly about it, but that typically means you just lack perspective. At the end of the day we're talking about browsers and websites, and while people may not LIKE it, when a business writes software it's a business decision as to whether or not they'll target all browsers or a subset.

By all means, keep on asserting things without demonstrating them and ignoring arguments and examples to the contrary. It doesn't actually convince, but I'm sure it makes you feel better.

I can tell you're young.
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