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Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

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Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#181

Post by saagarjha »

nexuist wrote: post #80
titzer wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontend engineering is a thing because of the accidental complexity of a massive software stack that's evolved by accretion and gone through fad after fad after fad. I'm not looking down on frontend engineers, but I don't believe right-to-left languages or focus order inevitably leads to hundreds of thousands of lines of code or 50+ MB binaries.

> don't believe right-to-left languages or focus order inevitably leads to hundreds of thousands of lines of code or 50+ MB binaries It does. It literally does. Try writing your own operating system, or font parser, or graphics engine. The work our shitty React apps sit on top of is unimaginably complex. It would take centuries for one single person to grasp what is going on in an iOS "Hello World" app. It's not simp…

> It would take centuries for one single person to grasp what is going on in an iOS "Hello World" app.

Not really. Several years, maybe.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#182

Post by jedisct1 »

exdsq wrote: post #22
ec109685 wrote: post #20

What was the reason for web assembly versus just running rust directly on the target hardware? Is the idea that the constrained WASM environment requires less QA than if the hardware was targeted specifically by the rust compiler?

If you target a WASM VM you’re not tied into Rust itself which seems appealing from a risk standpoint

ELF, COFF, Mach-O, etc. objects can already be linked together regardless of the compiler producing them.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#183

Post by DonHopkins »

astrange wrote: post #123
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #5

Language success is in large parts driven by what system adopts that language. Objective-C’s success was driven by iOS. C’s success was driven by Unix. C++’s early success was driven in large part by 90’s GUI frameworks ( MDC, OWL, Qt, etc. I think Wasm is shaping up to be huge in that you can safely run, high performance code across multiple operating systems/CPU’s. Of all the languages, I think Rust has the best WA…

> Objective-C’s success was driven by iOS. Well, Objective-C is from 1984 and its major success was being cloned to make a programming language called Java.

Java was a direct reaction to C++, not Objective C.

James Gosling's earlier object oriented PostScript based NeWS interpreter was a lot more like Objective C and Smalltalk than his later Java language was. (But I'm not going to mention the earlier abomination that was Gosling Emacs MockLisp. Oops!)

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mil...

>Bill Joy’s Law: 2^(Year-1984) Million Instructions per Second

>The peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically, S = 2^(Year-1984), in which S is the peak computer speed attained during each year, expressed in MIPS. -Wikipedia, Joy’s law (computing)

>Introduction: These are some highlights from a prescient talk by Bill Joy in February of 1991.

>“It’s vintage wnj. When assessing wnj-speak, remember Eric Schmidt’s comment that Bill is almost always qualitatively right, but the time scale is sometimes wrong.” -David Hough

>C++++-=: “C++++-= is the new language that is a little more than C++ and a lot less.” -Bill Joy

>In this talk from 1991, Bill Joy predicts a new hypothetical language that he calls “C++++-=”, which adds some things to C++, and takes away some other things.

>Oak: It’s no co-incidence that in 1991, James Gosling started developing a programming language called Oak, which later evolved into Java.

>“Java is C++ without the guns, knives, and clubs.” -James Gosling

>Fortunately James had the sense to name his language after the tree growing outside his office window, instead of calling it “C++++-=”. (Bill and James also have very different tastes in text editors, too!)

>[...]

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#184

Post by mhoad »

franga2000 wrote: post #145
Beltalowda wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest downside of this is that everything is painted as "graphics", and you can no longer use the web inspector to modify the fonts, colours, etc. While few people (like myself) do this directly, lots of people use it indirectly through extensions like Adblock, Stylus, etc. For example, I find the fonts hard to read due to the colour choices; then I zoom in and it's better, but now this "Widget gallery" no long…

Yes, I really hope this doesn't become common. By not utilising the DOM, you're killing accessibility, autofill, customization (things like reader mode, automatic dark themes...)... These are things that regular people rely on every day (not just us techies writing userscript a and Stylus themes).

I mean I would just argue that the accessibility APIs are currently tied to the DOM and we should fix that.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#185

Post by WA »

klabb3 wrote: post #155
nofunsir wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really sick of fast-churn and forced updates. Guys. Settle. Write a native app or three. It’ll be ok.

As someone who is writing a cross platform app, I'd love to, but I can't. There are too many different stacks with their own languages (which means different library ecosystems), no good FFI/IPC options that work across stacks, massive test matrix for every little piece of the code etc. All of this, when the native differences that supposedly should make each platform unique are so few, and virtually all UI and appli…

> Our platform lords have basically not standardized a single thing.

And in addition, you have bugs in official native SDKs and then you end up writing your own text rendering engine, because some OS-level API didn't work properly.

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#186

Post by pjmlp »

franga2000 wrote: post #145
Beltalowda wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest downside of this is that everything is painted as "graphics", and you can no longer use the web inspector to modify the fonts, colours, etc. While few people (like myself) do this directly, lots of people use it indirectly through extensions like Adblock, Stylus, etc. For example, I find the fonts hard to read due to the colour choices; then I zoom in and it's better, but now this "Widget gallery" no long…

Yes, I really hope this doesn't become common. By not utilising the DOM, you're killing accessibility, autofill, customization (things like reader mode, automatic dark themes...)... These are things that regular people rely on every day (not just us techies writing userscript a and Stylus themes).

It will definitly be the new common, by killing Flash et all without comparable tooling, while at the same time offering WASM, it was only a matter of time until we had the revenge of plugins.

Basically 10 years wasting time to come full circle.

https://leaningtech.com/cheerpj

https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/

https://opensilver.net/

All of the three major ones are now back, but it is ok, WASM is great!

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#187

Post by WA »

ad-astra wrote: post #127
shroompasta wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with this perspective. From a startup pov, going with native apps will require multiple teams (Usually just Android + iOS, but occasionally Windows as well) React Native will only require one team, or just one engineer depending on the size of the project Better yet, If your front end developer is fluent in React(web), then that developer is already fluent in React Native. I completely disagree on the "awf…

Former Dev that did Web -> Ionic -> RN -> Native iOS over the course of 6 years speaking here. - Web devs typically don’t have strong instincts for mobile apps, they require more mentorship & onboarding time. - Animation and interactivity is strongly limited in RN - You’re always so many levels removed from the actual APIs being used. For example, using UIKit and CoreAnimation are absolutely amazing and super lightwe…

> Web -> Ionic -> RN -> Native iOS

Although that list directly relates to the number of people you reach per line of code.

Web (all devices) -> Ionic (most devices) -> RN (Android + iOS) -> Native iOS (iOS only and probably only more recent devices).

People do cross-platform development, because it runs on so many platforms with almost no additional code. And for sure, you might not get the full experience of every platform this way, but maybe it's still good enough for users to solve their problems?!

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#188

Post by pjmlp »

DonHopkins wrote: post #183
astrange wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Objective-C’s success was driven by iOS. Well, Objective-C is from 1984 and its major success was being cloned to make a programming language called Java.

Java was a direct reaction to C++, not Objective C. James Gosling's earlier object oriented PostScript based NeWS interpreter was a lot more like Objective C and Smalltalk than his later Java language was. (But I'm not going to mention the earlier abomination that was Gosling Emacs MockLisp. Oops!) https://medium.com/@donhopkins/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mil... >Bill Joy’s Law: 2^(Year-1984) Million Instructions per…

You missed these ones,

"Java Was Strongly Influenced by Objective-C ...and not C++... A while back, the following posting was made by Patrick Naughton who, along with James Gosling, was responsible for much of the design of . Objective-C is an object-oriented mutant of C used NeXTSTEP and MacOS X, and also available with gcc."

https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

"In order to supply a comprehensive and flexible object programming solution, Sun turned to NeXT and the two developed OpenStep. The idea was to have OpenStep programs calling DOE objects on Sun servers, providing a backoffice-to-frontoffice solution on Sun machines. OpenStep was not released until 1993, further delaying the project.

By the time DOE, now known as NEO, was released in 1995,[1] Sun had already moved on to Java as their next big thing. Java was now the GUI of choice for client-side applications, and Sun's OpenStep plans were quietly dropped (see Lighthouse Design). NEO was re-positioned as a Java system with the introduction of the "Joe" framework,[2] but it saw little use. Components of NEO and Joe were eventually subsumed into Enterprise JavaBeans.[3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#189

Post by pjmlp »

xxs wrote: post #151
astrange wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Objective-C’s success was driven by iOS. Well, Objective-C is from 1984 and its major success was being cloned to make a programming language called Java.

While Obj-C had a massive influence to java, I'd not call it clone - even Java 0.9 is a lot better language than Obj-C of 2010 (or so). The saving grace of Obj-C - it could include normal C just like that.

Well, https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

And Java EE started as an Objective-C project, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

Re: Prime Video Uses WebAssembly

#190

Post by pjmlp »

wvenable wrote: post #98
rafale wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I would really love is to see XAML-like layout in the browser. CSS is a mess I can never wrap my mind around even with the flex model. Whereas the XAML model is much simpler (a measure pass to size components, an arrange pass to lay them).

XAML's layout components are much easier than HTML/CSS but styling XAML components is way over-complicated compared to CSS.

Thankfully there are tools like Blend.
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