4 ms·

What happened to Google's motto "Don't be evil?". Obviously they are trying to balkanize the web with non-standard technologies again.

by hasmoo 15y ago

melling 15y ago
Why would this be evil as long as Dart remains an open standard? Making it run better on their platform would incentivize the adoption of Chrome and Dart. Getting near native performance in the browser would help take web apps to another level. Photoshop in a browser, for example.
- hasmoo 15y ago
  Open standard? Dart is neither a standard nor designed in an open process.
  - vetinari 15y ago
    Just like canvas tag, right?
    - BrendanEich 15y ago
      I remember canvas in 2004, I demo'ed it in a Firefox prototype at Web 2.0 that fall. The development of the API took place on the very early whatwg.org, mailing list and even in a few face-to-face meetings (recorded to the list). It was IIRC based on PostScript level 2, or really an Objective-C API based on the PostScript-2 model, from Apple. But a bunch of others had early say in the wide-open (to members, and in terms of mailing list access) WHAT-WG on the exact API form and substance, and canvas evolved under this feedback years before it became a de-facto standard. It is still not a de-jure standard, as HTML5 isn't done yet. Perhaps Dart will evolve similarly, but I doubt it. Canvas was "easy" in that 2D graphics APIs (built into OSes, or portable ones such as Cairo) already existed and were a close-enough fit to the affine-transform-only 2D canvas API. Thus for most browsers, hooking up canvas was quick work, weeks if not days, modulo spec corner case fussing that dragged out for a while. In contrast, Dart requires either digesting the native VM source and learning to embed it (if not support it -- will other browsers just file bugs and wait for patches? doubtful), or else reverse-engineering it (some browser vendors have their own legal reasons not to use open source). And only then, once a VM of some kind has been minimally ported into a browser, would the work to integrate it with the DOM, JS, and any other languages which might have commerce among garbage collected heaps possibly begin. The last point means adding a cycle collector, which as Filip Pizlo of Apple points out here: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/018811.html https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/... is likely to cost noticeable performance. This is a far cry from canvas, both in terms of standardization politics and intrinsic complexity (which mainly determines odds of cross-browser support). Hope I wasn't feeding a troll! This may be educational to some, anyway.
      - vetinari 15y ago
        Hello, thanks for the reply. Yes, I was a bit snarky in mine, but didn't intend to troll. I was just an user, when the canvas tag appeared. I remember, that it was available for Safari and Dashboard on OSX, and then later in other browsers. I also remember, that at the time, Apple started to assert patents on it. Dart's imlementation is harder, I also agree. However, what I see from Google at this stage is call for cooperation to shape the language, not something that is done and the others have to accept as-is. The call may be considered even more public than whatwg mailing list. And yes, I agree that the complexity of integrating another VM into existing engines may kill it in the end. I actually do not like some design goals of Dart, but I understand, that there is demand for Java-like language in browser and that there is impedance mismatch between Java/GWT on one hand and JS in browsers on the other, that Dart intends to solve.
        BrendanEich 15y ago
        Dart is not just "harder" (a difference in degree), it is different in kind: a new programming language with a garbage collector, not a 2D graphics API that's close to one already available if not already in all browsers. Apple's origination doesn't alter this distinction between the nature of the two things, and Apple played fair once they contributed the work. Witholding patents when there was no WHATWG patent process or even a legal entity or membership structure was totally expected. The W3C has a patent protocol that Apple has used many times, and the w3c is where canvas has indeed landed as a Royalty-Free standard.
- ianso 15y ago
  Hum, I think the problem is that Dart may be technically open source, but it's not a standard. In addition to that you can publish the source but being truly open involves more than that: see the open governance index for an example: http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/08/android-is-the-least-open-of-a.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/08/android-is-the-le... It involves things like multi-vendor support, open project management & roadmapping, standards bodies where applicable, etc. These are all things Dart doesn't have.
- davidu 15y ago
  You've forgotten your history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish And don't think it's not possible, a number of MSFT folks who employed this strategy are now in leadership roles at GOOG.
  - Calamitous 15y ago
    [citation needed]
    - davidu 15y ago
      Are you kidding? Start with Vic Gundotra.
- BrendanEich 15y ago
  What open standard do you mean? Clue: open source != open standard. Code overspecifies badly. Any implementor who cannot or will not use the (evolving) Google code would have to reverse-engineer the "interop spec", which is less specific than the C++.
  - souichi 15y ago
    Please forgive me if I am wrong but JavaScript was not an "open standard" either in the beginning. It took you 1 year to submit it to the ECMA body for consideration. And, oh boy, you are still fixing JS design mistakes with a group of quite smart engineers and computer scientists. Now lets step back and look into the past: was JavaScript implementation or specification as open to comments and feedback as Dart is now? There are public mailing lists, issue tracker and open repositories that accept patches and suggestions. Did you have that for JavaScript? I might be utterly wrong but I bet you did not. Yet instead of participating in the language effort or at least stepping back and patiently watching it's birth and growth into something standardizable you criticize and bash it. May I humbly ask you why?
    - BrendanEich 15y ago
      You're new here, another 3-hour-old HN account. Do you by any chance work on Dart for Google? In any event, why don't you catch up and familiarize yourself with my arguments by reading my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2998374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2998374 and in the whole thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982256 --- begin quote --- ``Accusing me of hypocrisy shows ignorance of that word's definition in light of the history of my career. ``I'm not practicing one thing and preaching another. I worked on JS standardization less than a year after shipping it in Netscape 2 beta. After that I co-founded mozilla.org. I'm not currently doing A and preaching not-A, nor have I been doing "proprietary" work for a long time. I've paid my dues.'' --- end quote --- As for "criticize", my comment here asks what open standard someone else (not you) meant. I'd like to know. Let's hear the other person's answer, before criticizing anyone. I did not criticize a soul in my comment. As for "bash": stop lying. I did not bash a thing and you know it. The lamest form of non-argument is to whine about "bashing" and utterly fail to engage the substance of the other person's argument. You, however, are making an anonymous ad-hominem attack on me for not doing something Netscape simply would not support 16 years ago. I could have quit and let VBScript win. I'm not bragging about JS but (smart people on TC39 notwithstanding -- you needn't put me down by implying they're doing all the good-parts work :-/) JS has succeeded beyond many expectations. Good luck to Dart getting the same adoption. And JS won't go away quickly, so my position, independent of my past, is that we ought to improve it rather than starve it by trying to do a new language. Same as for HTML -- I co-founded the WHAT-WG to do HTML5 when the W3C abandoned HTML in 2004. Make no mistake: (1) Google is pulling people off of JS to do Dart; (2) Dart will not get foreseeable adoption in any browser of significant market share but Chrome. If Chrome had Netscape's market share, then Dart could probably become de-facto standard, as JS did back in 1996. Perhaps Chrome will get there, but it'll take a while, and in the mean time, Dart both costs JS (because Google has pulled people off of JS) and threatens to fragment the web (and WebKit first, the topic of this thread).
dman 15y ago
I propose googles new motto - "Quasi open"
supersillyus 15y ago
If this qualifies as "evil" to you, you have a much broader definition of evil than I do.

What happened to Google's motto "Don't be evil?". Obviously they are trying to balkanize the web with non-standard technologies again.

by hasmoo 15y ago

What happened to Google's motto "Don't be evil?". Obviously they are trying to balkanize the web with non-standard technologies again.

melling 15y ago

Why would this be evil as long as Dart remains an open standard? Making it run better on their platform would incentivize the adoption of Chrome and Dart. Getting near native performance in the browser would help take web apps to another level. Photoshop in a browser, for example.

hasmoo 15y ago
Open standard? Dart is neither a standard nor designed in an open process.
- vetinari 15y ago
  Just like canvas tag, right?
  - BrendanEich 15y ago
    I remember canvas in 2004, I demo'ed it in a Firefox prototype at Web 2.0 that fall. The development of the API took place on the very early whatwg.org, mailing list and even in a few face-to-face meetings (recorded to the list). It was IIRC based on PostScript level 2, or really an Objective-C API based on the PostScript-2 model, from Apple. But a bunch of others had early say in the wide-open (to members, and in terms of mailing list access) WHAT-WG on the exact API form and substance, and canvas evolved under this feedback years before it became a de-facto standard. It is still not a de-jure standard, as HTML5 isn't done yet. Perhaps Dart will evolve similarly, but I doubt it. Canvas was "easy" in that 2D graphics APIs (built into OSes, or portable ones such as Cairo) already existed and were a close-enough fit to the affine-transform-only 2D canvas API. Thus for most browsers, hooking up canvas was quick work, weeks if not days, modulo spec corner case fussing that dragged out for a while. In contrast, Dart requires either digesting the native VM source and learning to embed it (if not support it -- will other browsers just file bugs and wait for patches? doubtful), or else reverse-engineering it (some browser vendors have their own legal reasons not to use open source). And only then, once a VM of some kind has been minimally ported into a browser, would the work to integrate it with the DOM, JS, and any other languages which might have commerce among garbage collected heaps possibly begin. The last point means adding a cycle collector, which as Filip Pizlo of Apple points out here: https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/018811.html https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/... is likely to cost noticeable performance. This is a far cry from canvas, both in terms of standardization politics and intrinsic complexity (which mainly determines odds of cross-browser support). Hope I wasn't feeding a troll! This may be educational to some, anyway.
    - vetinari 15y ago
      Hello, thanks for the reply. Yes, I was a bit snarky in mine, but didn't intend to troll. I was just an user, when the canvas tag appeared. I remember, that it was available for Safari and Dashboard on OSX, and then later in other browsers. I also remember, that at the time, Apple started to assert patents on it. Dart's imlementation is harder, I also agree. However, what I see from Google at this stage is call for cooperation to shape the language, not something that is done and the others have to accept as-is. The call may be considered even more public than whatwg mailing list. And yes, I agree that the complexity of integrating another VM into existing engines may kill it in the end. I actually do not like some design goals of Dart, but I understand, that there is demand for Java-like language in browser and that there is impedance mismatch between Java/GWT on one hand and JS in browsers on the other, that Dart intends to solve.
      - BrendanEich 15y ago
        Dart is not just "harder" (a difference in degree), it is different in kind: a new programming language with a garbage collector, not a 2D graphics API that's close to one already available if not already in all browsers. Apple's origination doesn't alter this distinction between the nature of the two things, and Apple played fair once they contributed the work. Witholding patents when there was no WHATWG patent process or even a legal entity or membership structure was totally expected. The W3C has a patent protocol that Apple has used many times, and the w3c is where canvas has indeed landed as a Royalty-Free standard.
ianso 15y ago
Hum, I think the problem is that Dart may be technically open source, but it's not a standard. In addition to that you can publish the source but being truly open involves more than that: see the open governance index for an example: http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/08/android-is-the-least-open-of-a.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/08/android-is-the-le... It involves things like multi-vendor support, open project management & roadmapping, standards bodies where applicable, etc. These are all things Dart doesn't have.
davidu 15y ago
You've forgotten your history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish And don't think it's not possible, a number of MSFT folks who employed this strategy are now in leadership roles at GOOG.
- Calamitous 15y ago
  [citation needed]
  - davidu 15y ago
    Are you kidding? Start with Vic Gundotra.
BrendanEich 15y ago
What open standard do you mean? Clue: open source != open standard. Code overspecifies badly. Any implementor who cannot or will not use the (evolving) Google code would have to reverse-engineer the "interop spec", which is less specific than the C++.
- souichi 15y ago
  Please forgive me if I am wrong but JavaScript was not an "open standard" either in the beginning. It took you 1 year to submit it to the ECMA body for consideration. And, oh boy, you are still fixing JS design mistakes with a group of quite smart engineers and computer scientists. Now lets step back and look into the past: was JavaScript implementation or specification as open to comments and feedback as Dart is now? There are public mailing lists, issue tracker and open repositories that accept patches and suggestions. Did you have that for JavaScript? I might be utterly wrong but I bet you did not. Yet instead of participating in the language effort or at least stepping back and patiently watching it's birth and growth into something standardizable you criticize and bash it. May I humbly ask you why?
  - BrendanEich 15y ago
    You're new here, another 3-hour-old HN account. Do you by any chance work on Dart for Google? In any event, why don't you catch up and familiarize yourself with my arguments by reading my comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2998374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2998374 and in the whole thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982256 --- begin quote --- ``Accusing me of hypocrisy shows ignorance of that word's definition in light of the history of my career. ``I'm not practicing one thing and preaching another. I worked on JS standardization less than a year after shipping it in Netscape 2 beta. After that I co-founded mozilla.org. I'm not currently doing A and preaching not-A, nor have I been doing "proprietary" work for a long time. I've paid my dues.'' --- end quote --- As for "criticize", my comment here asks what open standard someone else (not you) meant. I'd like to know. Let's hear the other person's answer, before criticizing anyone. I did not criticize a soul in my comment. As for "bash": stop lying. I did not bash a thing and you know it. The lamest form of non-argument is to whine about "bashing" and utterly fail to engage the substance of the other person's argument. You, however, are making an anonymous ad-hominem attack on me for not doing something Netscape simply would not support 16 years ago. I could have quit and let VBScript win. I'm not bragging about JS but (smart people on TC39 notwithstanding -- you needn't put me down by implying they're doing all the good-parts work :-/) JS has succeeded beyond many expectations. Good luck to Dart getting the same adoption. And JS won't go away quickly, so my position, independent of my past, is that we ought to improve it rather than starve it by trying to do a new language. Same as for HTML -- I co-founded the WHAT-WG to do HTML5 when the W3C abandoned HTML in 2004. Make no mistake: (1) Google is pulling people off of JS to do Dart; (2) Dart will not get foreseeable adoption in any browser of significant market share but Chrome. If Chrome had Netscape's market share, then Dart could probably become de-facto standard, as JS did back in 1996. Perhaps Chrome will get there, but it'll take a while, and in the mean time, Dart both costs JS (because Google has pulled people off of JS) and threatens to fragment the web (and WebKit first, the topic of this thread).

dman 15y ago

I propose googles new motto - "Quasi open"

supersillyus 15y ago

If this qualifies as "evil" to you, you have a much broader definition of evil than I do.