Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla • Hacker News Board

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#121

Post by syrusakbary » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:50 AM UTC

CyberRabbi wrote: post #108

syrusakbary wrote: post #4

I have mixed feelings about this. In one side, I'm happy that some of the people affected by the Mozilla layoffs have now secured a job. On the other side, now almost all the power of the WASI standard is concentrated into the Fastly corporation (with wider penetration thanks to the WASI integration in Rust). The main and only player of the Bytecode Alliance becomes Fastly as well (as Mozilla is out of the server-sid…

Just curious, why do you have such a strong interest in the WASI logo? That seems tangential to wasmer’s concerns.

We use the logo in the wapm website [1].

Using a non-accessible logo that is hard to read provides a non-ideal experience for our visitors, so we can't really use it unless it becomes more polished.

This forced wapm to use a different WASI logo than the "official" one, which is also a non-ideal experience (it adds fragmentation). That's why we believe is just better to push all along a bit more polished logo.

Is such a simple thing to fix, that I'm surprised of the amount of flamewar that it generated.

[1] https://wapm.io/interface/wasi

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#122

Post by jacobush » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:51 AM UTC

FullyFunctional wrote: post #45

jhallenworld wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder which leads to a faster emulated machine?

Assuming the same implementation effort & skill: WASM, hands down (disclaimer: I have significant RISC-V experience and am an stout advocate, but RISC-V is a poor replacement for WASM). ADD: a few of the reasons: - When JITing RISC-V you cannot tell which are the last use of registers without a very expensive whole-graph analysis. Without that, you will have to generate more code than necessary. - WASM's representati…

Your comment made me idly wonder if there's a way to make an ISA which lends itself both to fast (even for low-gate implementations) hardware, and to fast JIT-ing.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#123

Post by Thorrez » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #113

tannhaeuser wrote: post #110

What I'm taking away from this, and the apparent infighting and legal/cred battles in the WASM scene it had surfaced, is to stay far, far away from WASM. Also, today I learned that staged discussions on HN are a thing, and even a practice so common it's got a nick name of "sock puppet". As if there weren't enough reasons to not follow the path of ever-increasing browser complexity, and fight to keep the web open. Tho…

To clarify one point, "sock puppet" accounts are an internet thing, they're not specific to HN. Usually a sock puppet discussion is one person controlling multiple accounts to make it look like there are people backing up and agreeing with their point.

Yeah, Wikipedia had a page about Wikipedia sockpuppets since 2004[1], 3 years before HN existed. Although I am quite partial to the MC Frontalot lyric about HN sockpuppets[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sockpup...

[2] https://youtu.be/Op1i0B8-dJA?t=57

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#124

Post by nanagojo » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:00 AM UTC

ChrisSD wrote: post #99

nanagojo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla already announced their new strategy, they are shifting into a "Product" focused company. Which why is they laid off all these teams. The browser is no longer the focus. Indeed they laid off the Servo team.

The browser is absolutely their focus which is why they laid off the Servo team. Servo is a research project, Gecko/Firefox is their browser. It's also a massive money sink. Firefox itself has zero income and yet keeping up with Google is fantastically expensive (even Microsoft decided to throw in the towel). So they cut teams that a) weren't directly working on their core browser and b) doesn't make money for spendi…

Contradicts their announcement on new product focus https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan...

And here is a 2013 post about the "next generation" engine (Servo) https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung...

> So they cut teams that a) weren't directly working on their core browser and b) doesn't make money for spending on their browser.

Exactly, that means they do not see any value in closing the gap with Chrome. Servo was this plan that launched years ago. See this paragraph from the above post from 2013

> Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web.

Not to mention their threat response team got laid off

https://www.securityweek.com/mozilla-cybersecurity-staff-hit...

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#125

Post by tannhaeuser » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:07 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #113

tannhaeuser wrote: post #110

What I'm taking away from this, and the apparent infighting and legal/cred battles in the WASM scene it had surfaced, is to stay far, far away from WASM. Also, today I learned that staged discussions on HN are a thing, and even a practice so common it's got a nick name of "sock puppet". As if there weren't enough reasons to not follow the path of ever-increasing browser complexity, and fight to keep the web open. Tho…

To clarify one point, "sock puppet" accounts are an internet thing, they're not specific to HN. Usually a sock puppet discussion is one person controlling multiple accounts to make it look like there are people backing up and agreeing with their point.

I guess what irritates me is not their mere existence, but their acceptance in passing among folks wanting to promote their stuff.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#126

Post by austhrow743 » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:10 AM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #101

syrusakbary wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bytecode Alliance veto of Wasmer happened the same day it was announced, on November 12 2019 (via direct message by one of their well-known members -now working at Fastly- to a Wasmer investor). Back then, the trademark was not even filed by the lawyers (if you look to the USPTO filings), so I'm not sure how the hostile actor argument could apply here (if we really buy into that argument). As reflected in other c…

Er... did you reply with your sock puppet by accident [1] [2]? If so that's kind of frowned on here, especially if you were using it to vote. I'm totally willing to entertain arguments that the Bytecode Alliance are also acting in bad faith. It's a harsh world and open source is not all unicorns and rainbows. But you can't just brush off the trademark issue by claiming it was unintentional. Especially when what you w…

Ah ha, thanked himself

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12584886

What a turd

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#127

Post by rossmohax » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:15 AM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #3

My money was on Cloudflare to have hired them wholesale. Regardless, congratulations to everyone involved! This deal has got me thinking... whether a right way to "lay-off" a supremely talented bunch is to actually see if other companies are willing to offer them jobs? Kind of how player transfers happen in Football (soccer). Either the team goes to the newer company wholesale or you help find your engineers suitable…

> This deal has got me thinking... whether a right way to "lay-off" a supremely talented bunch is to actually see if other companies are willing to offer them jobs? Kind of how player transfers happen in Football (soccer).

That's how Gitlab sold Gitter recently.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#128

Post by rasz » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:22 AM UTC

nanagojo wrote: post #96

kristopolous wrote: post #75

I'm out of the loop, I knew they were in trouble but Mozilla is carving up the talent pool? I really wish we could come up with sustainable models for not for (much) profit tech companies that was beyond our current systems of volunteer and "strategic partnerships" (as in, it's a side effect of a larger business strategy). Basically in this model, engineers would make maybe 80-160k. No options, no equity, no "going p…

Mozilla already announced their new strategy, they are shifting into a "Product" focused company. Which why is they laid off all these teams. The browser is no longer the focus. Indeed they laid off the Servo team.

and the Product is whatever they sell Google every couple of years.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#129

Post by hansjorg » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:27 AM UTC

nanagojo wrote: post #124

ChrisSD wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The browser is absolutely their focus which is why they laid off the Servo team. Servo is a research project, Gecko/Firefox is their browser. It's also a massive money sink. Firefox itself has zero income and yet keeping up with Google is fantastically expensive (even Microsoft decided to throw in the towel). So they cut teams that a) weren't directly working on their core browser and b) doesn't make money for spendi…

Contradicts their announcement on new product focus https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-chan... And here is a 2013 post about the "next generation" engine (Servo) https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung... > So they cut teams that a) weren't directly working on their core browser and b) doesn't make money for spending on their browser. Exactly, that means they do not see any v…

Several parts of Servo have been incorporated into Firefox (Stylo, Webrender, Pathfinder and more).

I think Servo was branded as a research project pretty early on. That it would replace Firefox wasn't very realistic.

Re: Fastly hires entire Wasmtime team from Mozilla

#130

Post by FullyFunctional » Tue, Oct 27, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

jacobush wrote: post #122

FullyFunctional wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming the same implementation effort & skill: WASM, hands down (disclaimer: I have significant RISC-V experience and am an stout advocate, but RISC-V is a poor replacement for WASM). ADD: a few of the reasons: - When JITing RISC-V you cannot tell which are the last use of registers without a very expensive whole-graph analysis. Without that, you will have to generate more code than necessary. - WASM's representati…

Your comment made me idly wonder if there's a way to make an ISA which lends itself both to fast (even for low-gate implementations) hardware, and to fast JIT-ing.

I suspect these are conflicting goals but an interesting question. My idle pondering are on ISAs that minimize the challenges in wide superscalar OoOE.