7 ms·

I think you have missed the context of his remarks; perhaps I should have pasted more from the original post. You seem to be talking about "what is necessary fo

I think you have missed the context of his remarks; perhaps I should have pasted more from the original post. You seem to be talking about "what is necessary for Dart to be a viable Web content language", while (I believe) Brendan is talking about "what are the consequences if Dart becomes a viable Web content language". If the Dart → JS compiler produces "good enough" results, and web authors wind up adopting it en masse, then suddenly a chunk of the web "works best in Google Chrome", and every other browser manufacturer is put into a very, very awkward position. They can do nothing, in which case their continued relevance depends on Google continuing to ship the Dart → JS compiler (and diminishes as users switch to Chrome). They can license the Dart VM from Google, in which case their continued relevance depends on Google continuing to license the VM and we have another large chunk of the Web based on a single binary monoculture (which worked so well for Flash!). Or, they can try to develop their own Dart VM, in which case they'll be eternally chasing the tail-lights of Google's VM, kept behind by Google's head-start and Google's engineering power. None of those options is very pleasant, in the long run, for anybody who doesn't own Google stock. As Brendan's original comment points out, this choice is not unique to Dart. Currently browser makers have picked option 3 ("write our own") to deal with V8, option 2 ("licence Google's implementation") to deal with WebM, and so far option 1 ("ignore it") to deal with SPDY. Under the carefully-managed tension of ECMA, the ECMAScript standard has become a much more practical language to develop in directly, and to target from higher-level languages — and with the agreement of all the major browser vendors including Google. It's not immediately obvious that a project like Dart is even needed; even if it is a major technical advance, it's a political regression.

georgemcbay 15y ago
I understand the context and still disagree. If Dart is so much better than JavaScript on Chrome and if its Dart->JS engine does a good enough job of creating usable JS on other browsers that developers are willing to commit to using it to write apps then, well, that's too bad for everyone else, isn't it? Why should Google put the brakes on improving client side development just because it puts other browsers in the uncomfortable position of having to license Dart (for free, since it is OSS and has a liberal patent grant)? The same would be true if Microsoft created some sort of .NET->JS compiler with their own VM for IE, or if Mozilla did the same with some new language. As long as they bridge to JavaScript, more power to them. Client side web development could certainly use some of the tools that these different language environments could offer and if it kicks off another performance race to get browser-side languages even faster (especially on mobile devices), so much the better for everyone. I really don't see how there is any downside (to anyone but maybe Brendan Eich) to widespread usage of Dart unless the Dart->JS code proves to be suboptimal, but in that case devs won't use it.
- thristian 15y ago
  When I first got onto the Internet, nearly every page I came across had a little image at the bottom saying "Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator". Since I was using Netscape, everything worked fine and I didn't care. Some time later, I began to see images saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". Everything still worked fine, so I still didn't care... but as time went on, more of those images popped up, and the pages they appeared on began to look much, much scrappier in Netscape than they did in Explorer. While most of them still worked, more or less, Explorer made a noticeable improvement. So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right? Find a web-developer who still has to work with IE6 and ask them what they think. Right now, Dart is freely-licensed and available to everybody, but who can contribute to it? Who will be allowed to veto compatibility-breaking changes? What happens if Apple announces some new hardware platform, and then Google coincidentally decides that supporting that platform in the Dart VM is no longer a priority, refuses to accept patches for it, and later refactorings happen to make it very difficult to maintain outside the official tree? What if the Dart VM becomes strategically important like Android, and current releases are only available to approved partners? Sure, it's very unlikely that all those things would happen, and fairly unlikely that even one of them would: up until now, Google has stuck pretty close to the "do no evil" thing. But if we stick with openly, collaboratively created technologies, those things are impossible, and "impossible" is better than "unlikely" in my book. If Dart were some kind of server-side thing Google wanted to use to increase the responsiveness of their sites, or something else internal to their systems, I wouldn't care — they're allowed to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own servers. It's only because the value proposition of Dart is "give Google an inherent advantage of control over the Web, and in exchange you will get shiny things" that I'm concerned. There'll always be more shiny things, but (so far) there's only one Web.
  - WayneDB 15y ago
    "So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right" Abso-friggin-lutely! You should be thanking Microsoft and Internet Explorer for upping everyone's game. They're the ones who introduced XmlHttpRequest. You knoww, "ajax"? It's their browser and they can do what they want with it. If you don't like it, don't use it. If everyone else likes it though, tough luck for you. Go build your own browser and language and drum up your own support for it. All of this political correctness is a bunch of bull.
cromwellian 15y ago
Dart is OSS, so I geuss if it really got mass adoption, Firefox and IE could adopt it. Yes, this would lead to a single implementation, I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it limits innovation from multiple implementations, on the other hand, incompatibilities between implementations, have been a big source of programmer headache in the first place. Flash was not bad in that respect and is one reason for it's success, despite its shortcomings. I mean, with Unix, most people are running a single implementation: Linux Kernel, and no one really cares about Open Solaris, or Darwin anymore. Really though, Brendan has made the argument that Javascript is fixable and that it is a good target for higher level languages, and I don't really agree with either of them. The changes I see being planned for ES.next don't really address some of the fundamental problems with JS, like network transport, or startup costs because of legacy constraints of not wanting to break existing JS. On mobile devices, loading a lot of Javascript is expensive, and I don't see anything in ES.next to bring it anywhere near competitive with native. If mobile is the future and the predominant way we consume the web, then we are at big risk of being dominated by native. Can we afford to wait years more for a promised fix that isn't even in sight? For a mobile device, ideally you'd want a dynamic language that could be atleast partially statically optimized for a particular device platform, and transmitted in a highly compact format that is cheap to parse and execute on a mobile VM to not make the device waste bandwidth or precious battery performing tasks that could be done on the server for it (like executing a parse and eval) Likewise, I don't agree that JS is an ideal intermediate format for higher level languages to compile to. I'm not saying LLVM or JVM bytecode are either, but if your HLL contains numerics like 64-bit ints or longs, for example, it's pretty crappy to translate. There's also double costs here: You're running a HLL compiler to parse, compile, and optimize one language, which then must be parsed, evaled, and optimized a second time on your target CPU. Something like DVM, or a bytecode specifically designed for JS would be better I think.
- thristian 15y ago
  There's a difference between open-source software and an open-source project. For example, compare the PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. Both are released under an open licence, but PostgreSQL is developed openly on a mailing-list and anyone can step up and contribute, while MySQL is developed privately by an organisation, with occasional source releases. No single entity has a majority control of PostgreSQL, but Oracle has a pretty firm grasp of MySQL. Likewise, even though Dart is supplied under an open licence, it remains to be seen whether it's operated more like PostgreSQL or more like MySQL. As I understand it, the V8 project is somewhere between the two, and Android is way up the MySQL end of the spectrum. Based on what Brendan has said, I doubt Mozilla would want such a large part of their platform based on a black box they can't control, and I can't really imagine Microsoft doing it. I don't think your Unix example is quite fair; the number of Unix systems on the planet is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of web-connected system. Even so, there's still a lot of people working with Darwin in the guise of iOS and OS X, and there's a decent number of computers running non-Unix-based operating systems too. I'll confess I'm not too familiar with the exact changes planned for ES.next, I just recall Brendan saying that improving JS as a primary language and as a compilation target were major goals in the ECMAScript committee. Maybe it's not there yet, but it can get there faster than it will take to add performant Dart VMs to every browser. Brendan talks about the specific issue of a standardised bytecode here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905291 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905291 (as part of an entire thread on the topic)
justinschuh 15y ago
The points you're using to substantiate your argument are not really in line with the facts. Many browsers broadly share a single implementation for huge chunks of the web. Examples off the top of my head include NSS, WebGL, LibPNG, LibJPEG, and WebM. And it's inaccurate to claim WebM is "licensed" from Google; that's no more true than claiming that NSS is "licensed" from Mozilla. Both are open source projects accepting third-party contributions. People can happily use the code as is, contribute to changing it, or simply fork it off. Finally, you seem to have missed the fact that Mozilla is already working on an experimentatl implementation of SPDY in Firefox: http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2011/09/spdy-what-i-like-about-you.html http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2011/09/spdy-what-i-like-about-yo...

georgemcbay 15y ago

I understand the context and still disagree. If Dart is so much better than JavaScript on Chrome and if its Dart->JS engine does a good enough job of creating usable JS on other browsers that developers are willing to commit to using it to write apps then, well, that's too bad for everyone else, isn't it? Why should Google put the brakes on improving client side development just because it puts other browsers in the uncomfortable position of having to license Dart (for free, since it is OSS and has a liberal patent grant)? The same would be true if Microsoft created some sort of .NET->JS compiler with their own VM for IE, or if Mozilla did the same with some new language. As long as they bridge to JavaScript, more power to them. Client side web development could certainly use some of the tools that these different language environments could offer and if it kicks off another performance race to get browser-side languages even faster (especially on mobile devices), so much the better for everyone. I really don't see how there is any downside (to anyone but maybe Brendan Eich) to widespread usage of Dart unless the Dart->JS code proves to be suboptimal, but in that case devs won't use it.

thristian 15y ago
When I first got onto the Internet, nearly every page I came across had a little image at the bottom saying "Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator". Since I was using Netscape, everything worked fine and I didn't care. Some time later, I began to see images saying "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". Everything still worked fine, so I still didn't care... but as time went on, more of those images popped up, and the pages they appeared on began to look much, much scrappier in Netscape than they did in Explorer. While most of them still worked, more or less, Explorer made a noticeable improvement. So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right? Find a web-developer who still has to work with IE6 and ask them what they think. Right now, Dart is freely-licensed and available to everybody, but who can contribute to it? Who will be allowed to veto compatibility-breaking changes? What happens if Apple announces some new hardware platform, and then Google coincidentally decides that supporting that platform in the Dart VM is no longer a priority, refuses to accept patches for it, and later refactorings happen to make it very difficult to maintain outside the official tree? What if the Dart VM becomes strategically important like Android, and current releases are only available to approved partners? Sure, it's very unlikely that all those things would happen, and fairly unlikely that even one of them would: up until now, Google has stuck pretty close to the "do no evil" thing. But if we stick with openly, collaboratively created technologies, those things are impossible, and "impossible" is better than "unlikely" in my book. If Dart were some kind of server-side thing Google wanted to use to increase the responsiveness of their sites, or something else internal to their systems, I wouldn't care — they're allowed to do whatever they want in the privacy of their own servers. It's only because the value proposition of Dart is "give Google an inherent advantage of control over the Web, and in exchange you will get shiny things" that I'm concerned. There'll always be more shiny things, but (so far) there's only one Web.
- WayneDB 15y ago
  "So, three cheers to Explorer for defeating Netscape and improving client-side development for everybody, right" Abso-friggin-lutely! You should be thanking Microsoft and Internet Explorer for upping everyone's game. They're the ones who introduced XmlHttpRequest. You knoww, "ajax"? It's their browser and they can do what they want with it. If you don't like it, don't use it. If everyone else likes it though, tough luck for you. Go build your own browser and language and drum up your own support for it. All of this political correctness is a bunch of bull.

cromwellian 15y ago

Dart is OSS, so I geuss if it really got mass adoption, Firefox and IE could adopt it. Yes, this would lead to a single implementation, I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it limits innovation from multiple implementations, on the other hand, incompatibilities between implementations, have been a big source of programmer headache in the first place. Flash was not bad in that respect and is one reason for it's success, despite its shortcomings. I mean, with Unix, most people are running a single implementation: Linux Kernel, and no one really cares about Open Solaris, or Darwin anymore. Really though, Brendan has made the argument that Javascript is fixable and that it is a good target for higher level languages, and I don't really agree with either of them. The changes I see being planned for ES.next don't really address some of the fundamental problems with JS, like network transport, or startup costs because of legacy constraints of not wanting to break existing JS. On mobile devices, loading a lot of Javascript is expensive, and I don't see anything in ES.next to bring it anywhere near competitive with native. If mobile is the future and the predominant way we consume the web, then we are at big risk of being dominated by native. Can we afford to wait years more for a promised fix that isn't even in sight? For a mobile device, ideally you'd want a dynamic language that could be atleast partially statically optimized for a particular device platform, and transmitted in a highly compact format that is cheap to parse and execute on a mobile VM to not make the device waste bandwidth or precious battery performing tasks that could be done on the server for it (like executing a parse and eval) Likewise, I don't agree that JS is an ideal intermediate format for higher level languages to compile to. I'm not saying LLVM or JVM bytecode are either, but if your HLL contains numerics like 64-bit ints or longs, for example, it's pretty crappy to translate. There's also double costs here: You're running a HLL compiler to parse, compile, and optimize one language, which then must be parsed, evaled, and optimized a second time on your target CPU. Something like DVM, or a bytecode specifically designed for JS would be better I think.

thristian 15y ago
There's a difference between open-source software and an open-source project. For example, compare the PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. Both are released under an open licence, but PostgreSQL is developed openly on a mailing-list and anyone can step up and contribute, while MySQL is developed privately by an organisation, with occasional source releases. No single entity has a majority control of PostgreSQL, but Oracle has a pretty firm grasp of MySQL. Likewise, even though Dart is supplied under an open licence, it remains to be seen whether it's operated more like PostgreSQL or more like MySQL. As I understand it, the V8 project is somewhere between the two, and Android is way up the MySQL end of the spectrum. Based on what Brendan has said, I doubt Mozilla would want such a large part of their platform based on a black box they can't control, and I can't really imagine Microsoft doing it. I don't think your Unix example is quite fair; the number of Unix systems on the planet is orders of magnitude smaller than the number of web-connected system. Even so, there's still a lot of people working with Darwin in the guise of iOS and OS X, and there's a decent number of computers running non-Unix-based operating systems too. I'll confess I'm not too familiar with the exact changes planned for ES.next, I just recall Brendan saying that improving JS as a primary language and as a compilation target were major goals in the ECMAScript committee. Maybe it's not there yet, but it can get there faster than it will take to add performant Dart VMs to every browser. Brendan talks about the specific issue of a standardised bytecode here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905291 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1905291 (as part of an entire thread on the topic)

justinschuh 15y ago

The points you're using to substantiate your argument are not really in line with the facts. Many browsers broadly share a single implementation for huge chunks of the web. Examples off the top of my head include NSS, WebGL, LibPNG, LibJPEG, and WebM. And it's inaccurate to claim WebM is "licensed" from Google; that's no more true than claiming that NSS is "licensed" from Mozilla. Both are open source projects accepting third-party contributions. People can happily use the code as is, contribute to changing it, or simply fork it off. Finally, you seem to have missed the fact that Mozilla is already working on an experimentatl implementation of SPDY in Firefox: http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2011/09/spdy-what-i-like-about-you.html http://bitsup.blogspot.com/2011/09/spdy-what-i-like-about-yo...