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.)
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.