61–64 of 64 posts
> On his impossibly beautiful blog I found the parallax background incredibly distracting. Maybe I just lack focusing skills, but I would much rather read a plain text file than have a slightly laggy background change every time I scroll.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
WebSQL was a completely separate debate, if I recall correctly, the issues there had to do with WebSQL being heavily dependent on SQLite, a single implementation. So it was hard to spec in a vendor-independent way like web standards require. IndexedDB is much less capable than SQLite, no doubt about it, but still very useful, and far far simpler and feasible to spec and standardize (which it has been).
But SQL is already standardized! They just have to determine a reasonable subset of the existing standard.
http://www.sqlite.org/datatypes.html
which is different than most RDBMSes.
In this exchange UTF-8 got dragged into list of ugly hacks, but it is a beautiful hack. Endian-independent, more efficient than UTF-16 for most languages (often including CJK web pages: halved cost of HTML & URLs makes up for 33% extra text cost), supports easy and safe substring search, can detect cut characters, and all that with ASCII and C-string backwards-compatibility. If I could redesign entire computing platf…
The disadvantage of utf-8 is that it's a variable length encoding. This means that certain operations which are usually O(1) are O(n) with UTF-8: one is finding the n-th character in a string, the other is finding the length in characters (though that's also true for null terminated C strings) Another problem is that swapping a character in a string might cause the (byte) length of the string to change, which might f…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
C is not sandboxed, and C has lots of undefined behavior. For those reasons, it is problematic for the web, which needs to let people view any site from any browser and platform, in a safe way. People have tried to "fix" those issues with C, and usually they end up going pretty far, ending up with stuff like the JVM or CLR.
this opinion is utterly unjustifiable imo and exactly what i mean by 'the old security arguments are obsolete' your comment suggest that you simply don't understand sandboxing and virtualisation i'm afraid. nor how the technology of the web works down to the metal.
For all I know, you have the knowledge and experience to hold your own, but do you realize that in just this thread you've defended your position by suggesting that (among others) the authors of Emscripten and Rust don't how understand the how the web works at a low level? This seems unlikely. I think you have a good point to make about the indirectness of asm.js, but your style of argument leaves something to be desired.