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> But we have been noticing an unfortunate trend that some developers have chosen to work contrary to the component model, creating strong links to their own ho

> But we have been noticing an unfortunate trend that some developers have chosen to work contrary to the component model, creating strong links to their own host runtimes. Going this route results in platform lock-in on one hand, and the pointless re-authoring of the same code (tooled for slightly different hosts) on the other. Oh dear lord. This is such a twisted narrative. The Component Model is a proposal that is only supported by one runtime out of the 20 used in production, none of them in the browser (don't look for it in v8, SpiderMonkey or Javascript Core, Wazero, Wasmer, Wizard Engine, WAVM, ...). So if there's anything that actually locks you in... is probably that! Even when Wasmer tried to add support for it on wit-bindgen (precursor for the Component Model), the same people from the Bytecode Alliance who are working on the Component Model proposal rejected it [1]. Do they really want collaboration and not lock-in? One begins to wonder. It gets even more funny when you continue reading the article and you also realize that all people in the WasmDay committee that decides what get's in our out their CNCF conference are also part of the Bytecode Alliance. When the only competition they "cheer" is the one that comes from their approved friends. I would highly encourage everyone to read some of the practices of the Bytecode Alliance that the AssemblyScript community has redacted, it might be eye opening! [2] [1] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen/issues/306 https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wit-bindgen/issues/306 [2] https://www.assemblyscript.org/standards-objections.html https://www.assemblyscript.org/standards-objections.html

jillesvangurp 4y ago
Ever since working in Nokia, I'm highly skeptical of standardization bodies being able to solve technical problems in a satisfying way. Companies use standardization bodies to play poker with their competitors. It's a complex game that involves patents, getting your pet proprietary features rubber stamped, and making sure you retain some inherent advantage over competitors. Above all, it's a very slow process. I saw Nokia play this game .. and lose. Apple and Google ignored several of the established standards to basically raise the bar and sideline the entrenched incumbents bickering over arcane details in those standards. Apple ignored MMS and most of other 3G features with the original iphone and it never became a feature any Apple user cared about. Google ignored things like J2ME. Other things they ignored were most of what operators were "standardizing" to prevent the internet being usable on their networks. All of that got shelved once Apple and Google allowed you to just use browser and internet based alternatives. Operators got demoted to routing IP packets around; the very thing they were trying to prevent by standardizing things that they controlled. The whole legacy business of charging per call minute or text message is completely dead at this point. They were trying to standardize that so they could keep the gravy train going. It failed. Not all standards are that bad of course. But resolving complex technical issues through a standardization body results in complicated solutions that are years/decades late to market and aren't necessarily very optimal. Standard bodies are very good at standardizing and normalizing the status quo though. Build something, get people to use it, and then standardize it so people can be assured about interoperability. This typically results in pragmatic standardized solutions. The more implementations are out there, the better. A lot of standards are so-called industry standards where a company or group of companies agree on doing things a certain way and then formalize their commitment by providing a specification. HTML5 is a good example. XHTML 1.0 is what happens when standards bodies go wrong. HTML5 happened because the W3C lost the plot at some point and got sucked down a path of writing/dictating increasingly less relevant standards in such a way that browser builders took it upon themselves to write a proper standard for what browsers were actually doing. Nokia was all over the W3C (I knew some people involved in various working groups). Since HTML5 happened then, things run a lot smoother on the web. WASM came out of that community and was moving relatively quickly because of that. From cute demos to being a not so visible but increasingly core part of the modern web in the space of a few years. Garbage collection to enable deep integration with e.g. the DOM in browsers, sockets to be able to do IO, threads to make better use of modern hardware are all things that are pretty fundamental to get right and they are happening. WASM isn't being standardized in a void. There are experimental flags in Chrome that you can turn on right now to explore the progress with these features. Firefox is not far behind. However, there is a worrying and growing amount of companies that are asserting themselves in the ByteCode Alliance. Too many conflicts of interest and political issues. Decision making must be getting quite hard. The way out is to move ahead with stuff that works and ask for forgiveness rather then permission. If enough people use it and it works, it will get standardized. Standardization comes at the end of that process, not at the beginning.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  > Since HTML5 happened then, things run a lot smoother on the web Eh, that's sure one way to describe the situation. Another one being that it's only Chrome left. Sure, W3C completely and utterly fucked up, but I thought we were beyond regurgitating 2009ish "HTML5 rocks" propaganda and genesis myths.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    I use Firefox. Safari is used exclusively on IOS and pretty dominant on MacOS. HTML5 works fine across those. The web app we develop has occasional issues with Safari that we need to look into. Things not working in both Firefox and Chrome is extremely rare for us and usually fixed pretty easily in the rare case we notice it. I remember having to deal with xhtml, html 4, Netscape, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc. a world of pain. Even by 2009, things were already massively improved (with the exception of IE of course). WhatWg was founded in 2004 and that's when work started on HTML5. That's before Chrome was a thing. That didn't happen until 2008 and would have not been possible without decent specifications provided by WhatWg. Apple and Mozilla were working together on that one. Chrome happened because of HTML 5; not the other way around.
    - sgbeal 4y ago
      > The web app we develop has occasional issues with Safari that we need to look into. Things not working in both Firefox and Chrome is extremely rare for us and usually fixed pretty easily in the rare case we notice it. FWIW, that mirrors my experience entirely. i primarily develop with FF and test with Chrome/Chromium as a sanity check. Safari, once the app is out the wild, is always the outlier (and i don't use it, so can't fix its shortcomings except via trial and error).
Jasper_ 4y ago
I am skeptical of WebAssembly and component-model myself, but that AssemblyScript page seems alarmist and as can be seen in several issues linked from that page, dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322 https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322 It seems most of the complaints are that selecting UTF-8 as a primary string encoding is "against the practices of the web", which seems patently absurd, but also, just plain boring. I was definitely expecting more along the lines of incompatible object models integrating into component‐model, rather than mass-tagging people over string encodings.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > It seems most of the complaints are that selecting UTF-8 as a primary string encoding is "against the practices of the web" And by "against the practices of the web" they really mean against the practices of Java/JavaScript. But I thought that was the whole point of WASM?
- syrusakbary 4y ago
  > dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith I certainly disagree with that take. I don’t see any bad faith, I only see one person being frustrated because his concerns were being thrown under the rug as "non important", I would recommend you to read on dcode's blog to learn more about it [1]. There are always things to improve regarding how we communicate, of course, but those should not be used as a weapon to attack or dismiss someone but as means to improve. It's also important to note that a few months after, the Wasm committee realized of the mistake and actually tried to solve it with the Wasm Stringref proposal [2]. The way I see the issue is not about UTF-8 vs UTF-16 but about how valid concerns were completely dismissed in what's supposed to be an open community [1] https://dcode.io/#webassembly https://dcode.io/#webassembly [2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    There are valid concerns to be had about string encodings, but I do not think a suggestion to "encourage UTF-8 for new formats and APIs" can be said to "literally breaking the Web Platform", nor does it require tagging 17 people, most of them unrelated, just because you happen to disagree the resolution of the committee.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

Ever since working in Nokia, I'm highly skeptical of standardization bodies being able to solve technical problems in a satisfying way. Companies use standardization bodies to play poker with their competitors. It's a complex game that involves patents, getting your pet proprietary features rubber stamped, and making sure you retain some inherent advantage over competitors. Above all, it's a very slow process. I saw Nokia play this game .. and lose. Apple and Google ignored several of the established standards to basically raise the bar and sideline the entrenched incumbents bickering over arcane details in those standards. Apple ignored MMS and most of other 3G features with the original iphone and it never became a feature any Apple user cared about. Google ignored things like J2ME. Other things they ignored were most of what operators were "standardizing" to prevent the internet being usable on their networks. All of that got shelved once Apple and Google allowed you to just use browser and internet based alternatives. Operators got demoted to routing IP packets around; the very thing they were trying to prevent by standardizing things that they controlled. The whole legacy business of charging per call minute or text message is completely dead at this point. They were trying to standardize that so they could keep the gravy train going. It failed. Not all standards are that bad of course. But resolving complex technical issues through a standardization body results in complicated solutions that are years/decades late to market and aren't necessarily very optimal. Standard bodies are very good at standardizing and normalizing the status quo though. Build something, get people to use it, and then standardize it so people can be assured about interoperability. This typically results in pragmatic standardized solutions. The more implementations are out there, the better. A lot of standards are so-called industry standards where a company or group of companies agree on doing things a certain way and then formalize their commitment by providing a specification. HTML5 is a good example. XHTML 1.0 is what happens when standards bodies go wrong. HTML5 happened because the W3C lost the plot at some point and got sucked down a path of writing/dictating increasingly less relevant standards in such a way that browser builders took it upon themselves to write a proper standard for what browsers were actually doing. Nokia was all over the W3C (I knew some people involved in various working groups). Since HTML5 happened then, things run a lot smoother on the web. WASM came out of that community and was moving relatively quickly because of that. From cute demos to being a not so visible but increasingly core part of the modern web in the space of a few years. Garbage collection to enable deep integration with e.g. the DOM in browsers, sockets to be able to do IO, threads to make better use of modern hardware are all things that are pretty fundamental to get right and they are happening. WASM isn't being standardized in a void. There are experimental flags in Chrome that you can turn on right now to explore the progress with these features. Firefox is not far behind. However, there is a worrying and growing amount of companies that are asserting themselves in the ByteCode Alliance. Too many conflicts of interest and political issues. Decision making must be getting quite hard. The way out is to move ahead with stuff that works and ask for forgiveness rather then permission. If enough people use it and it works, it will get standardized. Standardization comes at the end of that process, not at the beginning.

tannhaeuser 4y ago
> Since HTML5 happened then, things run a lot smoother on the web Eh, that's sure one way to describe the situation. Another one being that it's only Chrome left. Sure, W3C completely and utterly fucked up, but I thought we were beyond regurgitating 2009ish "HTML5 rocks" propaganda and genesis myths.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  I use Firefox. Safari is used exclusively on IOS and pretty dominant on MacOS. HTML5 works fine across those. The web app we develop has occasional issues with Safari that we need to look into. Things not working in both Firefox and Chrome is extremely rare for us and usually fixed pretty easily in the rare case we notice it. I remember having to deal with xhtml, html 4, Netscape, Opera, Internet Explorer, etc. a world of pain. Even by 2009, things were already massively improved (with the exception of IE of course). WhatWg was founded in 2004 and that's when work started on HTML5. That's before Chrome was a thing. That didn't happen until 2008 and would have not been possible without decent specifications provided by WhatWg. Apple and Mozilla were working together on that one. Chrome happened because of HTML 5; not the other way around.
  - sgbeal 4y ago
    > The web app we develop has occasional issues with Safari that we need to look into. Things not working in both Firefox and Chrome is extremely rare for us and usually fixed pretty easily in the rare case we notice it. FWIW, that mirrors my experience entirely. i primarily develop with FF and test with Chrome/Chromium as a sanity check. Safari, once the app is out the wild, is always the outlier (and i don't use it, so can't fix its shortcomings except via trial and error).

Jasper_ 4y ago

I am skeptical of WebAssembly and component-model myself, but that AssemblyScript page seems alarmist and as can be seen in several issues linked from that page, dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith: https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322 https://github.com/w3ctag/design-principles/issues/322 It seems most of the complaints are that selecting UTF-8 as a primary string encoding is "against the practices of the web", which seems patently absurd, but also, just plain boring. I was definitely expecting more along the lines of incompatible object models integrating into component‐model, rather than mass-tagging people over string encodings.

zozbot234 4y ago
> It seems most of the complaints are that selecting UTF-8 as a primary string encoding is "against the practices of the web" And by "against the practices of the web" they really mean against the practices of Java/JavaScript. But I thought that was the whole point of WASM?
syrusakbary 4y ago
> dcodeIO (from the AssemblyScript community) was definitely not behaving in good faith I certainly disagree with that take. I don’t see any bad faith, I only see one person being frustrated because his concerns were being thrown under the rug as "non important", I would recommend you to read on dcode's blog to learn more about it [1]. There are always things to improve regarding how we communicate, of course, but those should not be used as a weapon to attack or dismiss someone but as means to improve. It's also important to note that a few months after, the Wasm committee realized of the mistake and actually tried to solve it with the Wasm Stringref proposal [2]. The way I see the issue is not about UTF-8 vs UTF-16 but about how valid concerns were completely dismissed in what's supposed to be an open community [1] https://dcode.io/#webassembly https://dcode.io/#webassembly [2] https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref https://github.com/WebAssembly/stringref
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  There are valid concerns to be had about string encodings, but I do not think a suggestion to "encourage UTF-8 for new formats and APIs" can be said to "literally breaking the Web Platform", nor does it require tagging 17 people, most of them unrelated, just because you happen to disagree the resolution of the committee.