JavaScript performance, WebAssembly, and Shared Memory in Microsoft Edge

Re:JavaScript performance, WebAssembly, and Shared Memory in... by pcwalton on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:14PM (#14161736)

OpenGL is a standard, not an implementation! Imagine if were all stuck with SGI's implementation of GL instead of having it be a standard that the industry could create unique hardware implementations of. Would SGI have willingly collaborated with 3dfx on the Voodoo? Not likely--instead, 3dfx implemented a subset of the de facto GL standard, called it Glide, and created the entire PC GPU market in one fell swoop.

OpenGL is actually a great argument for the importance of multiple implementations--thanks for suggesting it :)

> everyone now has an incentive to refactor it into something nice.

My proposal to "refactor" Blink would be to completely redesign the layout system from the ground up to be parallel and to write as much as possible in Rust and JS in order to improve security. After working in this space for years, I've become increasingly convinced that this is what is needed in order for the Web to steal the performance crown from native, while simultaneously driving security forward.

Do you honestly think Google would be likely to collaborate on that?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:JavaScript performance, WebAssembly, and Shared Memory in... by derefr on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:19PM (#14161766)

I don't see it. My point doesn't change between talking about "a standard", and talking about "a FOSS project with open committee-based maintainership" (like e.g. ASF projects are.) It's stone soup: you'd start off with a worthless project—but if that pile of crap has to "feed the whole town", people are going to turn it into something worthwhile.

Eventually, in such an effort, there would probably be zero lines of code from the original project left. That's okay! It was there to bootstrap the project and inspire contributions, not to be good code.

> My proposal to "refactor" Blink would be to completely redesign the layout system from the ground up to be parallel and to write as much as possible in Rust in order to improve security. Do you think Google would be likely to collaborate on that?

Keep in mind that, if there really was just one impl that everyone used, there'd be more than one megacorp influencing it; Google would have no more say than anyone else, and would probably be "at arms' length" from the maintainership in the same way e.g. Apple is with Webkit. If Google didn't like an idea, but some other corp (e.g. Mozilla) did, sponsorship would still happen, code would still get written, and things would still change.

See: the Linux kernel.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:JavaScript performance, WebAssembly, and Shared Memory in... by pcwalton on Thursday April 20, 2017 @07:48PM (#14161909)

> Eventually, in such an effort, there would probably be zero lines of code from the original project left. That's okay! It was there to bootstrap the project and inspire contributions, not to be good code.

The Web doesn't need "bootstrapping" and "inspiring contributions". It's 20 years old!

> Keep in mind that, if there really was just one impl that everyone used, there'd be more than one megacorp influencing it; Google would have no more say than anyone else, and would probably be "at arms' length" from the maintainership in the same way e.g. Apple is with Webkit. If Google didn't like an idea, but some other corp (e.g. Mozilla) did, sponsorship would still happen, code would still get written, and things would still change.

No, the organization that didn't like the change would fork the project. This already happened with WebKit!

> See: the Linux kernel.

Linux gets forked over and over and over again, every time some organization wants to ship a device running it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:JavaScript performance, WebAssembly, and Shared Memory in... by derefr on Thursday April 20, 2017 @08:28PM (#14162114)

> No, the organization that didn't like the change would fork the project. This already happened with WebKit!

Er, this whole thought exercise is about what would happen if it was literally impossible to fork the project. If everyone was forced to work on one implementation, full-stop, no takesie-backsies. (I'm imagining aliens from the Culture holding guns to our heads.)

It's a very implausible thought-exercise, yes, but if you're playing along, you can't challenge the axioms. (It's like one of those "how would a One World Government work" discussions: saying "there could never be one" is beside the point.)

[ Parent | on HN ]