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The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

brendaneich.github.com

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Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#211

Post by daeken »

BrendanEich wrote: post #187
aplzrtve wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll rephrase: why is any new VM to be relegated to the OS? The presence of incumbent VMs? JS is an incumbent. Pepper is similar to nsapi, and has nice features which are compatible with HTML5's implementation (as in canvas). Saying it shouldn't be adopted because Nobody is adopting it is circular. What are old-style plugins? Anything not JS?

I said clearly why Pepper is not being adopted: it is a gigantic pile of API and implementation specified only by the C++ in chromium.org svn. Other browsers cannot port all that OS and WebKit glue code except at very high cost, direct and opportunity -- and even then on a bet that Pepper + NaCl wins, and again on a treadmill far behind Chrome. Do you actually work on a browser codebase? If so, have you worked on com…

> Other browsers cannot port all that OS and WebKit glue code except at very high cost

Why would any other browser need that glue code? The Pepper API is large but fairly straightforward and doesn't change dramatically between revisions. In addition, I don't believe Google has ever said that they wouldn't make the development process around those changes more open (at least making them public before pushing the new implementation out to the world).

> Do you actually work on a browser codebase? If so, have you worked on competing browsers' codebases at all? Do you begin to see the problem? It's not quite Active X (open source is a small help), but it's on that slope and uphill only a bit.

I've only worked on Webkit a small amount (mainly doing security analysis) but I worked with Pepper a good deal and I've worked on Gecko for a decent while now. I really don't see the incompatibility; there are plenty of good arguments against NaCl, but I don't think there's a fundamental problem there. I can definitely understand not wanting to allocate resources to the issue, but not being opposed to the issue in general.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#212

Post by BrendanEich »

daeken wrote: post #211
BrendanEich wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said clearly why Pepper is not being adopted: it is a gigantic pile of API and implementation specified only by the C++ in chromium.org svn. Other browsers cannot port all that OS and WebKit glue code except at very high cost, direct and opportunity -- and even then on a bet that Pepper + NaCl wins, and again on a treadmill far behind Chrome. Do you actually work on a browser codebase? If so, have you worked on com…

> Other browsers cannot port all that OS and WebKit glue code except at very high cost Why would any other browser need that glue code? The Pepper API is large but fairly straightforward and doesn't change dramatically between revisions. In addition, I don't believe Google has ever said that they wouldn't make the development process around those changes more open (at least making them public before pushing the new i…

> Why would any other browser need that glue code?

Because other browsers do not use WebKit, or at least chromium WebKit. Are you really asserting that no glue code is required on any other browser?

> The Pepper API is large but fairly straightforward

Where is the spec? You are not in the real world here.

There are plenty of differences between Gecko's audio APIs and Pepper's. If you really work on Gecko, mail me about this. I have reason to doubt your claims here.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#213

Post by [deleted] »

BrendanEich wrote: post #205
haberman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. My label of "dishonest" was in regards to a statement, not you personally, just like your label of "astoundingly naive" against me. And I didn't speculate about motives. I'm not sure what statements of mine you're taking so much offense to, but your speech has also been brusque and uncharitable at times ("Who are you to say...", "Here's a final clue:"). I also went out of my way to empathize with Mozilla'…

You wrote, very first comment at top: "To dis NaCl on this basis and not even mention PNaCl is dishonest." That was in response to my slides. You were calling me dishonest. Come on yourself! You then went on about "propaganda" and scary salt crystals. Something is off right there. Mozilla doesn't make propaganda and we have a tiny fraction of Google's budget (which I can assure you has been deployed commercially to p…

[deleted]

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#214

Post by haberman »

sayrer wrote: post #206
haberman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. My label of "dishonest" was in regards to a statement, not you personally, just like your label of "astoundingly naive" against me. And I didn't speculate about motives. I'm not sure what statements of mine you're taking so much offense to, but your speech has also been brusque and uncharitable at times ("Who are you to say...", "Here's a final clue:"). I also went out of my way to empathize with Mozilla'…

does PNaCl work? do you know the answer to that question?

I have not personally used it, but the documentation at http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/pnacl/building-and-test... indicates that it is at least capable of running spec2k. I don't know what's complete and what is incomplete. I do know that it is the stated goal of the NaCl project to achieve portability through PNaCl; that alone makes it deserving of mention in this context (https://developers.google.com/native-client/overview#distrib...).

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#215

Post by BrendanEich »

cmccabe wrote: post #203
bzbarsky wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"proprietary" is a spectrum, not a binary decision. You can be open-source, documented (though NaCl is not so documented in practice because of the Pepper dependencies), published, and encouraged to adopt, but if your development is controlled completely by a single company and if you depend on other, undocumented, parts of that company's software stack, then you are more proprietary than something with an open (as i…

Sigh. Not all open source projects are community projects. That doesn't make them proprietary. I'm disappointed to see this kind of confusion on HN. Rust doesn't have much of a community around it, besides Mozilla. Does that make it "proprietary"? Nope. We all know NaCl is not going to be adopted-- not because it's not good enough, but because it's too good, and would threaten the native app ecosystems of Apple and M…

On TypeScript, are you seriously asking for warning-annotations? The class syntax is in for ES6, not original to TS. Or do you mean 'interface' as structural type (record width subtyping relation) declaration form?

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#216

Post by qwinter »

BrendanEich wrote: post #205
haberman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. My label of "dishonest" was in regards to a statement, not you personally, just like your label of "astoundingly naive" against me. And I didn't speculate about motives. I'm not sure what statements of mine you're taking so much offense to, but your speech has also been brusque and uncharitable at times ("Who are you to say...", "Here's a final clue:"). I also went out of my way to empathize with Mozilla'…

You wrote, very first comment at top: "To dis NaCl on this basis and not even mention PNaCl is dishonest." That was in response to my slides. You were calling me dishonest. Come on yourself! You then went on about "propaganda" and scary salt crystals. Something is off right there. Mozilla doesn't make propaganda and we have a tiny fraction of Google's budget (which I can assure you has been deployed commercially to p…

Please stop signing your posts.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#217

Post by haberman »

BrendanEich wrote: post #205
haberman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh come on. My label of "dishonest" was in regards to a statement, not you personally, just like your label of "astoundingly naive" against me. And I didn't speculate about motives. I'm not sure what statements of mine you're taking so much offense to, but your speech has also been brusque and uncharitable at times ("Who are you to say...", "Here's a final clue:"). I also went out of my way to empathize with Mozilla'…

You wrote, very first comment at top: "To dis NaCl on this basis and not even mention PNaCl is dishonest." That was in response to my slides. You were calling me dishonest. Come on yourself! You then went on about "propaganda" and scary salt crystals. Something is off right there. Mozilla doesn't make propaganda and we have a tiny fraction of Google's budget (which I can assure you has been deployed commercially to p…

You seem a lot more interested in getting me to take back things than you are in taking back your misleading slide.

Substitute whatever adjectives you want if the ones I used offend you, but the point still remains that the most vocal criticism of (P)NaCl comes from Mozilla and it is anything but "balanced."

I would feel more inclined to issue an actual retraction if there was any indication that I was mistaken about this or that it would change.

That said I'm not really interested in arguing further, since we've clearly reached an impasse. I admire the work you have done with JavaScript, and I admire the work Mozilla has done over the years on many great products.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#218

Post by _urga »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #92
_urga wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. Browsers are constraining innovation to a top-down approach, where browser vendors try to design and implement alternatives to things like TCP, POSIX. What would be better is if browser vendors exposed a core low-level API to trusted installed web apps (as opposed to web pages) and then let open source build on that. For example, instead of coding up IndexedDB and leaving no alternative, just provide pr…

How would you expose POSIX on Windows?

POSIX is an interface not an implementation.

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#219

Post by _urga »

gsnedders wrote: post #137
_urga wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. Browsers are constraining innovation to a top-down approach, where browser vendors try to design and implement alternatives to things like TCP, POSIX. What would be better is if browser vendors exposed a core low-level API to trusted installed web apps (as opposed to web pages) and then let open source build on that. For example, instead of coding up IndexedDB and leaving no alternative, just provide pr…

Because there's more interest in improving the (publicly accessible) web as a platform than improving installed web apps. Regardless, to expose such a low-level API would eliminate one of the big advantages of the web: given a browser, I can use any web app on any device. Given, for example, given a TV (which are typically closed platforms, but increasingly often include a fully featured browser), you likely wouldn't…

No, it would not eliminate the big advantage of the web as you say, merely deepen it.

See Tim Berners-Lee: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2012JanMa...

Re: The State of JavaScript - Brendan Eich

#220

Post by _urga »

BrendanEich wrote: post #152
_urga wrote: post #66

I would really like support for 64-bit integers and native 64-bit math.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=749786 based on http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:value_object... . ES7 at this point. Help test. I need to put up a rebased patch...

Thanks Brendan, that is good news, added to the cc list, looking forward.
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