3 ms·

While I agree with your view of HTML+CSS+JS in relation to X and would even go as far as to say the shift towards "webified" apps is (mostly) a good thing, it s

While I agree with your view of HTML+CSS+JS in relation to X and would even go as far as to say the shift towards "webified" apps is (mostly) a good thing, it still saddens me as a developer to see it happening. It's an ecosystem that doesn't discourage lazy practices and it makes me feel unimportant because modern computers can more or less keep up with even the most poorly-written webified apps. I think it's that sentiment that caused the lash-out you describe. But hey, that's why I'm in embedded development. That field is still safe for now.

TickleSteve 10y ago
agree with you.... ...but the embedded world is also being slowly infected with JS, java and people wanting to run interpreters on embedded devices for which they are totally inappropriate. Oh well.
api 10y ago
IMHO the problem is that you actually do need a decent chunk of all that stuff. Not all, but a good chunk. A UI engine is a problem on par with creating a good game engine like Unity. If you don't have a loooooooong list of capabilities and polish your UI is a toy. By the time you extend and build it out enough to make it not a toy you will have re-implemented either Aqua/Cocoa, Microsoft's UI, or the web but yours will be new and nobody will know how to code for it. Now make it flexible and programmable and extensible enough to be future-proof and battle hardened. Now make it work remotely over the wire with good performance. Now make it fast and efficient. Now make it secure. The web isn't perfect by any stretch but it's IMHO the best combination of: - Complete - Modern - Battle tested, including security - Maintained by professionals - Can be made to look good - Has a yuuuuge developer community that isn't going anywhere Qt is the closest other contender but its dev community is less than 1% of the web's. It's also starting to... ahem... look more and more like a web stack. It's still a little lighter and faster than the web but not much, and IMHO that gap is narrowing and will narrow even more. Look into Mozilla Quantum for an example of what's coming. We're going to have aggressively multithreaded GPU-assisted HTML+CSS renderers and web assembly soon. JS is not my favorite language but it's not bad either for what it is (IMHO) and ES6+ features make it a lot better. It's a very acceptable "BASIC for the 21st century" and is perfectly fine for driving a presentation layer, schlepping data around, and controlling stuff. JS VMs are impressively fast given the difficulty of accelerating the language, and they are not overly heavy. WASM is going to break down this barrier as well by allowing CLANG to target the web as a native platform. Web renderers are heavy but an OS that embraces the web as its presentation layer across the board could load one instance of all that bloat instead of one instance per app. (A web browser on this imaginary platform would be a thin wrapper around an iframe.) You'd have to pay a lot of attention to security. You might have to fork or implement a few added things into a good web engine to make it ready for such a use case, like better security models and resource management models around iframes. But that pales in comparison to the work it would take to re-invent a stack from scratch and reach this level of capability and then to build an entire ecosystem of this size and breadth around that stack. Forget about that unless you have a billion dollars to burn.
- moosingin3space 10y ago
  For a web browser on this imaginary platform, see browser.html. Regarding security, it seems like something like Servo on top of a capability system like seL4 or Robigalia could provide a lot of opportunity to enhance the client security of a web application. Using wasm + WebGL (or whatever's in the pipeline for Vulkan) could make this easy to deploy creative applications. Add IPFS into this mix, and we'll be able to deploy decentralized applications as easily as central-server applications. I'd like to see better tooling for building UIs on the web before I could get fully behind this idea, but I agree that the web platform has been BY FAR the most successful GUI framework ever, and I say this as someone who works nearly exclusively on systems programming.
- xj9 10y ago
  The Enlightenment project[1] covers a decent number of the requirements you mention and has corporate backing from Samsung. [1]: https://enlightenment.org https://enlightenment.org

TickleSteve 10y ago

agree with you.... ...but the embedded world is also being slowly infected with JS, java and people wanting to run interpreters on embedded devices for which they are totally inappropriate. Oh well.

api 10y ago

IMHO the problem is that you actually do need a decent chunk of all that stuff. Not all, but a good chunk. A UI engine is a problem on par with creating a good game engine like Unity. If you don't have a loooooooong list of capabilities and polish your UI is a toy. By the time you extend and build it out enough to make it not a toy you will have re-implemented either Aqua/Cocoa, Microsoft's UI, or the web but yours will be new and nobody will know how to code for it. Now make it flexible and programmable and extensible enough to be future-proof and battle hardened. Now make it work remotely over the wire with good performance. Now make it fast and efficient. Now make it secure. The web isn't perfect by any stretch but it's IMHO the best combination of: - Complete - Modern - Battle tested, including security - Maintained by professionals - Can be made to look good - Has a yuuuuge developer community that isn't going anywhere Qt is the closest other contender but its dev community is less than 1% of the web's. It's also starting to... ahem... look more and more like a web stack. It's still a little lighter and faster than the web but not much, and IMHO that gap is narrowing and will narrow even more. Look into Mozilla Quantum for an example of what's coming. We're going to have aggressively multithreaded GPU-assisted HTML+CSS renderers and web assembly soon. JS is not my favorite language but it's not bad either for what it is (IMHO) and ES6+ features make it a lot better. It's a very acceptable "BASIC for the 21st century" and is perfectly fine for driving a presentation layer, schlepping data around, and controlling stuff. JS VMs are impressively fast given the difficulty of accelerating the language, and they are not overly heavy. WASM is going to break down this barrier as well by allowing CLANG to target the web as a native platform. Web renderers are heavy but an OS that embraces the web as its presentation layer across the board could load one instance of all that bloat instead of one instance per app. (A web browser on this imaginary platform would be a thin wrapper around an iframe.) You'd have to pay a lot of attention to security. You might have to fork or implement a few added things into a good web engine to make it ready for such a use case, like better security models and resource management models around iframes. But that pales in comparison to the work it would take to re-invent a stack from scratch and reach this level of capability and then to build an entire ecosystem of this size and breadth around that stack. Forget about that unless you have a billion dollars to burn.

moosingin3space 10y ago
For a web browser on this imaginary platform, see browser.html. Regarding security, it seems like something like Servo on top of a capability system like seL4 or Robigalia could provide a lot of opportunity to enhance the client security of a web application. Using wasm + WebGL (or whatever's in the pipeline for Vulkan) could make this easy to deploy creative applications. Add IPFS into this mix, and we'll be able to deploy decentralized applications as easily as central-server applications. I'd like to see better tooling for building UIs on the web before I could get fully behind this idea, but I agree that the web platform has been BY FAR the most successful GUI framework ever, and I say this as someone who works nearly exclusively on systems programming.
xj9 10y ago
The Enlightenment project[1] covers a decent number of the requirements you mention and has corporate backing from Samsung. [1]: https://enlightenment.org https://enlightenment.org