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> Imagine a world where APIs are only called from inside proprietary binary blobs that are built and released by the API provider. I don't have to imagine it.

by wahern 6y ago

> Imagine a world where APIs are only called from inside proprietary binary blobs that are built and released by the API provider. I don't have to imagine it. It exists, and it was created by people who insisted on building ridiculously complex software stacks which have made it increasingly difficult to write your own stack. And the few open source stacks are slowly winnowed down because it becomes a feature arms race and eventually the last option standing is the "free" crippled version of some corporate developed library. Sending and receiving a DNS UDP query, and extracting your RR of interest, takes a few dozen lines of C code. (Using TCP is just as easy if not easier.) Now imagine doing something so simple, but first having to build the SSL and HTTP stacks (or, shudder, QUIC). Nobody would do it. Everybody would just use the same piece of software. This is exactly how we ended up with Chrome and an unimaginably empowered Google. And it was for the same reasons--"imagine how easy it will be for a web developer to implement feature FOO if we simply added feature FOO to the browser and he could just call do.FOO!"

javajosh 6y ago
>I don't have to imagine it. It exists. Not sure what you mean, here. HTTP-based APIs have been really good, I think, for the world overall, and not just because exposing services this was allows you to tunnel arbitrary application data through firewalls! Are the real blobs you're referring to the browser? I don't think that's fair, because a browser does far more than curl. And curl-level functionality is a lot simpler. >a few dozen lines of C code... ...built and executed in a specific runtime environment. And since we are talking about distributed programs, by nature, you will be faced with solving all of those painful lessons we've learned about security, performance, and scale, but this time with your own custom starting assumptions. I think it's quite fair to accept the "curl abstraction" (expressed in callback hell form as get(request, callback(response)) as a basic building block of your system, as opposed to doing something lower level.

by wahern 6y ago

javajosh 6y ago

>I don't have to imagine it. It exists. Not sure what you mean, here. HTTP-based APIs have been really good, I think, for the world overall, and not just because exposing services this was allows you to tunnel arbitrary application data through firewalls! Are the real blobs you're referring to the browser? I don't think that's fair, because a browser does far more than curl. And curl-level functionality is a lot simpler. >a few dozen lines of C code... ...built and executed in a specific runtime environment. And since we are talking about distributed programs, by nature, you will be faced with solving all of those painful lessons we've learned about security, performance, and scale, but this time with your own custom starting assumptions. I think it's quite fair to accept the "curl abstraction" (expressed in callback hell form as get(request, callback(response)) as a basic building block of your system, as opposed to doing something lower level.