Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#101

Post by btlr » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 3:22 PM UTC

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #96

cmiles74 wrote: post #91

The quotes from the Web Assembly team at Mozilla and Solomon Hykes read like these people are suffering from some kind of late 1990s amnesia. Till Schneidereit is saying exactly the same thing Sun said when Java was announced. Acting like they are breaking new ground strikes me as unhelpful and it's not clear to me how it will help the cause. Maybe WebAssembly will enjoy more success than Java, I truly hope that it d…

> It's all about sales and marketing and, eventually, politics. Not in this case. Java failed because it sucked from a technical point of view. It traded better 'OO purity' in exchange for worse security, portability and performance. The end result is that users got something that was slower and buggier for no gain.

Where did you get this "Java failed" idea? Java is one of the most widely used languages in the whole world...

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#102

Post by TimTheTinker » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

DebtDeflation wrote: post #81

0815test wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On a then-average p166 with 24mb of ram, your browser would go unresponsive while loading, jumpy mouse cursor, os starting to swap, and then some irregular annoying hangs while the GC did its thing. Reminds me of client-side JS frameworks. Or Electron apps. > Not to mention how ugly awt and swing looked even back then. Web UI is still as ugly as ever, of course. Peak UX usability was native UIs in the 1990s and ear…

Who is downvoting this? >Peak UX usability was native UIs in the 1990s and early 2000s So much this. Give me Win2K and Office2K style applications - multiple tiled or overlapping windows, modeless views, regular menus and toolbars, context sensitive right click menus, etc. over this single pane with a hamburger button and search box crap any day of the week.

I’d argue that Mac OS (9/X) hit peak usability in the mid to late 2000s, when they were still trying to dethrone Windows.

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#103

Post by otabdeveloper1 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

btlr wrote: post #101

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's all about sales and marketing and, eventually, politics. Not in this case. Java failed because it sucked from a technical point of view. It traded better 'OO purity' in exchange for worse security, portability and performance. The end result is that users got something that was slower and buggier for no gain.

Where did you get this "Java failed" idea? Java is one of the most widely used languages in the whole world...

Java failed as a portable language-agnostic VM for user-facing apps.

You know, the use-case it was originally designed for. (I read the hype for Java 1.0, I was there.)

Nobody at the time could imagine that Java would eventually become the enterprise COBOL replacement.

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#104

Post by cmiles74 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 3:39 PM UTC

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #96

cmiles74 wrote: post #91

The quotes from the Web Assembly team at Mozilla and Solomon Hykes read like these people are suffering from some kind of late 1990s amnesia. Till Schneidereit is saying exactly the same thing Sun said when Java was announced. Acting like they are breaking new ground strikes me as unhelpful and it's not clear to me how it will help the cause. Maybe WebAssembly will enjoy more success than Java, I truly hope that it d…

> It's all about sales and marketing and, eventually, politics. Not in this case. Java failed because it sucked from a technical point of view. It traded better 'OO purity' in exchange for worse security, portability and performance. The end result is that users got something that was slower and buggier for no gain.

Java didn't succeed in terms of running code in a web page but it has been wildly successful in regards to "write once, run everywhere". It is widely deployed and has been successful isolating code specific to a particular OS or platform.

While it's clear that Javascript has been successful in the "run code in a web page" sense, it's primary deployment target remains the web browser; even when it's marketed as a cross-platform solution it's often targeting something like Electron.

WebAssembly has its work cut out for it trying to succeed in both of these spaces. I think the project might enhance it's chances for success by remembering Java and its browser plugin rather than pretending they are the first.

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#105

Post by dmitriid » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 3:40 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #89

dmitriid wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Javascript/WASM is not controlled by any one large company or organization It’s disproportionally affected by Google.

Given that Mozilla has done tons of WASM work, and that one of the earliest implementors was Rust, comparing WASM to Oracle's iron fist over the JVM doesn't seem to jive with reality...

I didn’t say Mozilla, I said Google.

I didn’t say iron fist, I said disproportionately affected.

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#106

Post by cmiles74 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 3:45 PM UTC

otabdeveloper1 wrote: post #103

btlr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get this "Java failed" idea? Java is one of the most widely used languages in the whole world...

Java failed as a portable language-agnostic VM for user-facing apps. You know, the use-case it was originally designed for. (I read the hype for Java 1.0, I was there.) Nobody at the time could imagine that Java would eventually become the enterprise COBOL replacement.

I'm not so sure it failed. I use IntelliJ IDEA daily, people in my office use WebStorm for Javascript development. There are Swing applications out there that people use, admittedly the ones I've seen are mostly business software. And of course all Android applications are leveraging Java.

It's argued that only IDEs use Java, but Java + Swing strikes me as the most popular cross-platform language and toolkit currently in use.

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#107

Post by TheCoelacanth » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 3:48 PM UTC

Faark wrote: post #86

quantummkv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not surprised. As someone who cut his programming teeth on Java and .Net, modern web development feels really out of touch with reality. I really don't get why the community is hell bent on reinventing the wheel, especially when the main defense of npm is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's really disheartening to see that the best minds of the generation are busy spending time to reinvent the same o…

> It's really disheartening to see that the best minds of the generation are busy spending time to reinvent the same old things instead of trying to improve upon the existing systems. I hear that often in regard of programming languages. But I see a lot of value in remixing a lot of existing ideas in a new package. A wheel can only be so round and its interaction with the road is quite simple, but tech is different.…

Applying the "reinventing the wheel" meme to scenarios like this kind of misses that wheels actually have been reinvented numerous times resulting in major advancements in wheel technology.

Reinventing the wheel takes a lot of effort to be worth doing, because it takes a lot of effort to improve foundational technology, but it is sometimes worth doing if you are going to put an appropriate level of resources into it.

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#108

Post by LameRubberDucky » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:05 PM UTC

avian wrote: post #58

ksec wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I really don't get why the community is hell bent on reinventing the wheel, especially when the main defense of npm is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's really disheartening to see that the best minds of the generation are busy spending time to reinvent the same old things instead of trying to improve upon the existing systems. I think it might have to do with people considering 40 as very old in Silic…

I often wonder why this is the fact in software development and not nearly much so in other fields. Isn't the point of education that each generation doesn't have to learn past mistakes by repeating them? Do computer science curricula not include enough historical perspective? I feel like other fields of engineering don't have such a dismissive approach to their own pasts. Show an electrical engineering class an old…

I feel like the world of computer programming is caught in a very fast iteration of the old adage, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Which oddly, I was curious about that quote's origins, so I just went and looked it up. The full quote in context is:

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana (1863 - 1952) [The Life of Reason (1905-1906) Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense]

This neatly dovetails with the thoughts that were floating in my head. This part, is the explanation I believe, for the current state of programming, "when experience is not retained, infancy is perpetual."

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#109

Post by pcwalton » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:06 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #47

quantummkv wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not surprised. As someone who cut his programming teeth on Java and .Net, modern web development feels really out of touch with reality. I really don't get why the community is hell bent on reinventing the wheel, especially when the main defense of npm is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's really disheartening to see that the best minds of the generation are busy spending time to reinvent the same o…

>I really don't get why the community is hell bent on reinventing the wheel, especially when the main defense of npm is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. It's really disheartening to see that the best minds of the generation are busy spending time to reinvent the same old things instead of trying to improve upon the existing systems. I think it might have to do with people considering 40 as very old in Silic…

It may surprise you that the people behind Web Assembly are largely senior compiler developers who have certainly been around the block. Dan Gohman has forgotten more about compilers and VMs than 99% of the commenters here will ever know.

Re: Mozilla announces WebAssembly System Interface, what JVM should have been

#110

Post by pcwalton » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 4:11 PM UTC

LameRubberDucky wrote: post #108

avian wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often wonder why this is the fact in software development and not nearly much so in other fields. Isn't the point of education that each generation doesn't have to learn past mistakes by repeating them? Do computer science curricula not include enough historical perspective? I feel like other fields of engineering don't have such a dismissive approach to their own pasts. Show an electrical engineering class an old…

I feel like the world of computer programming is caught in a very fast iteration of the old adage, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Which oddly, I was curious about that quote's origins, so I just went and looked it up. The full quote in context is: "Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direc…

You realize that the people behind Web Assembly, for example Dan Gohman, are some of the foremost world experts in compilers who have worked for literally decades in the field?