Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

troubles.md

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#51

Post by devwastaken »

BeeOnRope wrote: post #45
titzer wrote: post #8

[one of the original Wasm designers here] Responding to the OP, since there is no comment section on the site. First off, this rant gets the history of Wasm wrong and the facts of Wasm wrong. I wouldn't unload on a random person on the internet generally, but I would like to point a sentence like: > Not only that, but for the most part the WebAssembly specification team were flying blind. It's an ad hominem. This rea…

> It's an ad hominem. This really just impugns people and invites an argument. It might be cathartic, but generally it doesn't advance the conversation to cast aspersion like this. It is not an ad hominem in any sense! For one thing, this part isn't even an attack - here the author is trying to explain and essentially forgive why the (allegedly) sub-optimal design was chosen: that there wasn't enough information at t…

That's not technical criticism. You can't know if the devs are 'flying blind', and given the lack of knowledge the author had, they were throwing deprecating words around. It is saying they didn't know what they're doing. Regardless it's still ad hominem, and unnecessary if the author could show it instead of say it.

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#52

Post by derefr »

devwastaken wrote: post #51
BeeOnRope wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an ad hominem. This really just impugns people and invites an argument. It might be cathartic, but generally it doesn't advance the conversation to cast aspersion like this. It is not an ad hominem in any sense! For one thing, this part isn't even an attack - here the author is trying to explain and essentially forgive why the (allegedly) sub-optimal design was chosen: that there wasn't enough information at t…

That's not technical criticism. You can't know if the devs are 'flying blind', and given the lack of knowledge the author had, they were throwing deprecating words around. It is saying they didn't know what they're doing. Regardless it's still ad hominem, and unnecessary if the author could show it instead of say it.

No: an ad hominem is a specific thing, and this is not an example of one. For something to be an ad hominem, it has to make an assertion that—if true—would still be completely irrelevant to the truth-value of the syllogism, and yet will serve to convince the reader anyway, usually by the rhetorical power of the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect causing them to think that something that has irrelevant faults must also have (possibly unknown) relevant faults.

An example of an ad hominem: saying that someone must have cheated on their taxes, because they have some depraved sexual kink. Whether or not the assertion (“X is a fetishist”) is true, it is obviously irrelevant to ascertaining the truth of whether X cheats on their taxes.

An example of a not-ad-hominem: saying that someone is more likely to have cheated on their taxes, because they are an old rich white man. This might be stereotyping (i.e. inductive reasoning), it might be a “personal attack”, and it might be disallowed in a debate for any number of other reasons, but it’s not an ad hominem: being in the relevant class really does have some correlation (however small) with cheating on one’s taxes (mostly because all groups other than the relevant group consist of people with less access to the resources that would allow them to get away with cheating on their taxes.) Therefore, the truth-value of the assertion is not entirely irrelevant to the syllogism—so it’s not an ad hominem.

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#53

Post by pizlonator »

nonsince wrote: post #41
garganzol wrote: post #16

Huh? Web assembly is a stack machine and locals do not pose a problem whatsoever. Yes, the author just needs more work to be done. But it's perfectly doable, although it has a complexity. Like everything in the world of compilers. There are no free lunches.

Yes compilers are hard, but why make them harder? There is literally no reason to require rebuilding this information. The compiler emitting Wasm has that information and already uses it, having locals and disallowing blocks to take/return values actually means more complexity in both the compilers generating Wasm and the runtimes generating native code from Wasm. That's the entire premise of the article.

Even if carrying that information was the thing that you needed (I don’t think it is but there’s a separate thread about that), it’s definitely not the thing that other implementations need.

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#54

Post by derefr »

titzer wrote: post #8

[one of the original Wasm designers here] Responding to the OP, since there is no comment section on the site. First off, this rant gets the history of Wasm wrong and the facts of Wasm wrong. I wouldn't unload on a random person on the internet generally, but I would like to point a sentence like: > Not only that, but for the most part the WebAssembly specification team were flying blind. It's an ad hominem. This rea…

Does the meaning of the statement change if you interpret “the WebAssembly specification team” as referring not to the formal group that got together once it was decided that WebAssembly was “a thing”, but rather to the group of people designing the binary representation of asm.js back before WebAssembly existed? I would think that they were indeed “flying blind”, in the sense that the only “compiler” they were working against was the JS interpreter, and in the sense that they weren’t yet conceiving of there being a formal abstract machine separate from the JS interpreter (this formal abstract machine being what “WebAssembly” essentially refers to) but rather just compiling to “a subset of JS” in a way that seems to make the code run efficiently.

I.e. just change the one word “WebAssembly” to “asm.js” in the sentence you quoted. Consider it a typo. Does the history now read correctly?

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#55

Post by skybrian »

kbenson wrote: post #28
davidgrenier wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that line should be read as "they were doing something novel" as opposed to "they were ignorant".

Flying blind is one of those odd expressions which is historically used to indicate something that is somewhat less negative than what someone would assume, if interpreting it without that context, making it easy to be interpreted differently by different parties. It's generally used to indicate operating without information that's really required, but historically it's used when that information is missing because s…

To resurrect a dead metaphor, from an aviation point of view, "flying blind" (VFR into IMC such as flying into a cloud when not flying on instruments) is a very dangerous situation that everyone is trained to avoid. If the weather is bad enough then you stay on the ground.

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#57

Post by hinkley »

tomxor wrote: post #19
titzer wrote: post #8

[one of the original Wasm designers here] Responding to the OP, since there is no comment section on the site. First off, this rant gets the history of Wasm wrong and the facts of Wasm wrong. I wouldn't unload on a random person on the internet generally, but I would like to point a sentence like: > Not only that, but for the most part the WebAssembly specification team were flying blind. It's an ad hominem. This rea…

> It's an ad hominem. This really just impugns people and invites an argument. It might be cathartic, but generally it doesn't advance the conversation to cast aspersion like this. Ignoring any factual incorrectness, I can not see how the author could have made his point in a more respectful way. He clearly has great enthusiasm for WASM and respect for it's authors, I am struggling to see how anyone could have interp…

In an engineering discipline, asserting that someone is 'flying blind' could very, very easily be taken as offensive. Knowing what's going on and why is so fundamental to 'good engineering' practice that you basically are calling the people ethical failures. 'Impugn' is a perfectly reasonable word for how someone might react to such an aspersion.

Maybe in the future don't accuse engineers of 'flying blind' if you aren't inviting return fire.

From context there was a lot of conjecture going on, but the big challenge with building something new is what order to build the bits in to give you the most useful information fastest. As the number of people goes above 2 the odds that everyone agrees or that 'everyone' is right drop rapidly toward zero. You do the best you can, and hope it's good enough that you still have time to react to the worst of the decisions you made earlier. But it's not 'flying blind'.

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#58

Post by jungler »

hinkley wrote: post #57
tomxor wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an ad hominem. This really just impugns people and invites an argument. It might be cathartic, but generally it doesn't advance the conversation to cast aspersion like this. Ignoring any factual incorrectness, I can not see how the author could have made his point in a more respectful way. He clearly has great enthusiasm for WASM and respect for it's authors, I am struggling to see how anyone could have interp…

In an engineering discipline, asserting that someone is 'flying blind' could very, very easily be taken as offensive. Knowing what's going on and why is so fundamental to 'good engineering' practice that you basically are calling the people ethical failures. 'Impugn' is a perfectly reasonable word for how someone might react to such an aspersion. Maybe in the future don't accuse engineers of 'flying blind' if you are…

Wow, not the kind of engineering room I'd want to be in. You have to be able to make claims that the other party does not have a complete picture of the situation, and an external critic is indeed going to be vulnerable to the same criticism.

Maybe you would have a point if it were a Linus-style "only a fucking idiot would" rant. But responding to a sincere attempt to defend a design decision as if it were an insult is some prima donna behavior.

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#59

Post by kbenson »

skybrian wrote: post #55
kbenson wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying blind is one of those odd expressions which is historically used to indicate something that is somewhat less negative than what someone would assume, if interpreting it without that context, making it easy to be interpreted differently by different parties. It's generally used to indicate operating without information that's really required, but historically it's used when that information is missing because s…

To resurrect a dead metaphor, from an aviation point of view, "flying blind" (VFR into IMC such as flying into a cloud when not flying on instruments) is a very dangerous situation that everyone is trained to avoid. If the weather is bad enough then you stay on the ground.

I agree, it's not a situation a sane person chooses to be in when given an alternative, but sometimes it's unavoidable, and I think that implication is part of the common context it's supposed to carry (but is easily lost when reading it literally).

Re: WebAssembly Troubles Part 1: WebAssembly Is Not a Stack Machine

#60

Post by BeeOnRope »

devwastaken wrote: post #51
BeeOnRope wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an ad hominem. This really just impugns people and invites an argument. It might be cathartic, but generally it doesn't advance the conversation to cast aspersion like this. It is not an ad hominem in any sense! For one thing, this part isn't even an attack - here the author is trying to explain and essentially forgive why the (allegedly) sub-optimal design was chosen: that there wasn't enough information at t…

That's not technical criticism. You can't know if the devs are 'flying blind', and given the lack of knowledge the author had, they were throwing deprecating words around. It is saying they didn't know what they're doing. Regardless it's still ad hominem, and unnecessary if the author could show it instead of say it.

> That's not technical criticism.

To be clear that particular phrase wasn't direct technical criticism - but it was embedded in an article that was largely technical and it was in direct support of the technical arguments (essentially "it ended up like that because no compilers, streaming or not, existed yet").

I think you should look carefully at the definition of ad hominem. You say that the author couldn't have known what he was asserting. Maybe, sure! That doesn't relate to it being an ad hominem though (it would make it simply false). You say the worse are deprecating. I don't really agree, but even if they were that doesn't by itself make it an ad-hominem.

Ad hominem needs all three factors: _personal_, _irrelevant_ and _an attack_.

I think you can make very good arguments that it was not an attack and certainly that it was not irrelevant. I would even argue it's not personal, since it is not an about a personal characteristic of any person, but simply an observation about what point in time an event took place. Like if I said "you were FLYING BLIND because you had to decide whether to take you umbrella before knowing the weather at your destination", it is not even a personal thing: just observing that you had to decide before you had all the information.

Post reply on HN