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If you target a WASM VM you’re not tied into Rust itself which seems appealing from a risk standpoint
How so? Your source code is still in Rust so seems like you'd still be tied to it.
Prime Video app sucks. Spend less time over-optimizing, more time improving usability.
I imagine the other streaming apps use similar techniques to share code, so I wonder why theirs is so poor in this regard.
Outside of the major players though it gets a lot worse - Funimation's streaming app is horrendous, as is Crunchyroll's. At least Prime Video is doing better than that tier.
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I mean, Microsoft seems to be making it clear that the replacement for old-school ASP.NET formsy apps to be Blazor, which is C# you write that runs in the browser via WASM. Makes making SPAs easier if that’s your stack. https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...
I'm rewriting an MVC 5 app in Blazor as we speak. I'm "full-stack" but my JS skills are pretty low compared to C#, which I am extremely comfortable with. It is actually extremely fun to work with. Havin ability to inject a service directly into a page is amazing. I'm hoping Blazor gets more popular. However, I will see how this project goes and if I hit any major road blocks, so my opinion my shift. So far it seems l…
Personally, to me , whenever I read these stories about how Amazon is doing this novel use of WebAssembly, or how Uber is doing ludicrous engineering effort to keep their React-based app under 300MB for the App Store, I can't help but think: "Man, that's an awful lot of work to avoid writing a native app."
Writing a native app for every conceivable platform someone might want to watch Prime Video on seems an awful lot of work
My own strategy would be to keep the generic electron version and then make a native app for the top 5 most popular TV models but that’s just me.
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I remember back in the day when doom9 was blocked at the corp firewall level because it had posts on how to circumvent things. Nevermind it was the unofficial support for things like AVISynth, x264, etc. Even the nascent days of ffmpeg were there. It took a lot of cajoling and back and forth with legal depts, but eventually, was allowed to be granted access on an individual basis I owe a lot of what was accomplished…
>For the person up thread talking about learning things, I wish I was in that position today with them rather than 20 odd years ago where everyone was in the dark Where would you start today? And what was being circumvented? Copyright protection?
Where would I start today? That depends on your level of interest, and what you want to do. Are you wanting to learn things to do to stay hip and cool making videos for the socials, or are you wanting to do technical things to video for less prestigious ends? That's two different paths that intertwine, but different recommendations depending.
That's not a rhetorical question, btw. I've been in both fields, and continue to work in both. There's lots of reading, and today watching videos, but the biggest thing will be the access to actually doing the things that weren't possible so freely 20 years ago. Try things, make mistakes, learn, do again.
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Writing a native app for every conceivable platform someone might want to watch Prime Video on seems an awful lot of work
" But why , though?" I keep asking myself, from a "how many darn buttons and doodads does it really need to have?" perspective. I suspect the issue is that people write entirely too much dang code to solve what is, after all, a fairly simple UI problem [1]. I mean, seriously. The Alto had less than a megabyte of RAM and managed to invent the GUI--menus, mouse, all. How have we managed to make this harder in 40 years?…
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I love native apps. But on the scale of Amazon (and having to compete with Netflix), slightest bit of friction, in this case downloading and installing an app, accepting permissions, etc takes a minute or two. It would be absolutely catastrophic to their competitiveness. You need to think more broadly on scale.
If you read the original article, the use of WebAssembly is mainly across a broad array of device types where it will be packaged into an app. That app will require installation, accepting permissions, and all of that just like a native app. The point is moot except for anyone watching Prime Video in the web browser.
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Because it's not just buttons and doodads, it's all the error handling and loading indicators and UI edge cases that are needed to make it seamless and good. Title too long? Does it get truncated or shrunk? Does the UI reverse itself for RTL languages? Does the focus ring move in a sensible order? This is front end engineering. It's a whole profession, and when it's done poorly, folks think your software is garbage.…
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.
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 simple, at all. Especially not for a video streaming service! I mean, my God, just being able to understand the codecs and licensing issues would take you months, let alone writing decoders that run natively on every platform. Let alone dealing with monitors and color schemes and HDMI and Chromecast streaming and window resizing and bandwidth limits and buffering and....
It's not simple.
EDIT: For reference, vim, a Hacker News favorite and widely considered one of the most popular TUIs ever built, is currently sitting at about 1.2 million lines of code. All it does is edit text files. Imagine if it had to play video.