5 ms·

Stay away from Kool Aid. ;-) Really, this is unfounded and unjustified speculation.

andybak 13y ago
As silly as the preceding comment was. it's becoming common to hear similar sentiments and it just shows that Google has a severe PR problem amongst it's people who would previously have sung it's praises.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  The PR problems come with success and size. It's impossible for any large organization, no matter how "non-evil" to avoid criticism and conspiracies. Google has done better than most in still maintaining good will, but obviously PRISM isn't helping, and Microsoft and Apple communities are both pushing the privacy angle. (If you really think these concerns are totally organically driven, I encourage you to look at complaints about 'google tracking you' before/after Android was launched, or follow the trail of Microsoft shell organizations and their whisper campaigns) Google commands tremendous marketshare with Chrome now, and so people are going to be hyper-sensitive about anything it does. But I would read PPK on Blink for example (http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html) to see how Google is treating the Web. Honestly, the Web has been driven forward tremendously in the last few years with HTML5, CSS3, WebRTC, etc but Javascript hasn't budged much, although performance has increased, the warts of the language have not been fixed, and TC39 is taking too long. That's why you're seeing everyone create languages that compile down to JS. My biggest concerns are that if the problems of the Web platform aren't fixed, especially for mobile, a whole generation of people will be raised on native apps, and the most amazing platform for distribution of federated, transparent information in human history will lose. Simply put, the Web is more important than Javascript.
RyanZAG 13y ago
Hi Ray I respect your work a lot, but are you sure your view is not biased a bit by working for Google? It's sometimes hard to disconnect from that kind of working environment to see the kind of issues into the future certain practices can have. Dart turning into something bad for the web is really not all that unfounded or unjustified. You don't have to agree, but you shouldn't dismiss that argument so quickly. Dismissing this kind of thing is what leads to 'impossible' scenarios happening. The point needs to be raised, repeatedly, and hopefully within Google as well. As long as a possibility exists for Google to misuse Dart, there needs to be voices speaking out against that possible misuses before it occurs, not after.
- cromwellian 13y ago
  Dart is no more an attempt to replace the web with a walled garden than GWT is (which is what I work on). It is a tool, like Typescript, like CoffeeScript, like ClojureScript, like Emscripten. There's no "plan" to create a lock-in walled garden based around programming language. Google is interested in making the experience of developing web apps better, and making web apps more performant. They have many different strategies for this: Chrome DevTools, AngularJs, Web Components and other spec improvements, Dart, Closure Compiler, GWT, etc. The company does not make money from selling the Chrome browser, and unlike Microsoft, it doesn't make money from selling an OS. The incentives are not aligned like the way they were with IE and Windows. At the end of the day, Google makes money from people using the web. The real threat is from the Web falling too far behind Native. Also, the Web is far far bigger than the programming language Javascript. For the first 10+ years of the Web, people hardly even used JS except for form validation, and in general, on mobile, excessive amounts of JS lead to poor performance. There's still a ways to go on just HTML and CSS, and I'd frankly be more concerned about fragmentation in that area rather than fixation on Javascript. The way I see the potential of a DartVM is the same as OdinMonkey+asm.js. Dart compiles to JS, but DartVM will run it slightly faster, but it will always work on all browsers. Likewise, asm.js will work on all browsers, but will always run faster on OdinMonkey. Both Mozilla and Google have VMs that potentially bifurcate performance across browsers, but still produce outputs that can run (albeit slower) The concerns you should have about Google misusing Dart I think should really be about Google misusing market share. It's not really Dart per se that's the issue, it's the fact that if Chrome is the dominant browser, Google can drop anything they want into it, not just Dart, but any APIs they want.
  - pcwalton 13y ago
    The asm.js comparison is a false equivalence. It is not possible (without explicit effort, e.g. checking the UA string) for Web authors to ship asm.js that does not work in Chrome, because asm.js is just JavaScript. With Dart, Web authors may end up not shipping the JS fallback, or not testing it, thus locking the Web into Chrome. That is why turning on the Dart VM for Web content would be a problem.

As silly as the preceding comment was. it's becoming common to hear similar sentiments and it just shows that Google has a severe PR problem amongst it's people who would previously have sung it's praises.

cromwellian 13y ago
The PR problems come with success and size. It's impossible for any large organization, no matter how "non-evil" to avoid criticism and conspiracies. Google has done better than most in still maintaining good will, but obviously PRISM isn't helping, and Microsoft and Apple communities are both pushing the privacy angle. (If you really think these concerns are totally organically driven, I encourage you to look at complaints about 'google tracking you' before/after Android was launched, or follow the trail of Microsoft shell organizations and their whisper campaigns) Google commands tremendous marketshare with Chrome now, and so people are going to be hyper-sensitive about anything it does. But I would read PPK on Blink for example (http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2013/04/blink.html) to see how Google is treating the Web. Honestly, the Web has been driven forward tremendously in the last few years with HTML5, CSS3, WebRTC, etc but Javascript hasn't budged much, although performance has increased, the warts of the language have not been fixed, and TC39 is taking too long. That's why you're seeing everyone create languages that compile down to JS. My biggest concerns are that if the problems of the Web platform aren't fixed, especially for mobile, a whole generation of people will be raised on native apps, and the most amazing platform for distribution of federated, transparent information in human history will lose. Simply put, the Web is more important than Javascript.

RyanZAG 13y ago

Hi Ray I respect your work a lot, but are you sure your view is not biased a bit by working for Google? It's sometimes hard to disconnect from that kind of working environment to see the kind of issues into the future certain practices can have. Dart turning into something bad for the web is really not all that unfounded or unjustified. You don't have to agree, but you shouldn't dismiss that argument so quickly. Dismissing this kind of thing is what leads to 'impossible' scenarios happening. The point needs to be raised, repeatedly, and hopefully within Google as well. As long as a possibility exists for Google to misuse Dart, there needs to be voices speaking out against that possible misuses before it occurs, not after.

cromwellian 13y ago
Dart is no more an attempt to replace the web with a walled garden than GWT is (which is what I work on). It is a tool, like Typescript, like CoffeeScript, like ClojureScript, like Emscripten. There's no "plan" to create a lock-in walled garden based around programming language. Google is interested in making the experience of developing web apps better, and making web apps more performant. They have many different strategies for this: Chrome DevTools, AngularJs, Web Components and other spec improvements, Dart, Closure Compiler, GWT, etc. The company does not make money from selling the Chrome browser, and unlike Microsoft, it doesn't make money from selling an OS. The incentives are not aligned like the way they were with IE and Windows. At the end of the day, Google makes money from people using the web. The real threat is from the Web falling too far behind Native. Also, the Web is far far bigger than the programming language Javascript. For the first 10+ years of the Web, people hardly even used JS except for form validation, and in general, on mobile, excessive amounts of JS lead to poor performance. There's still a ways to go on just HTML and CSS, and I'd frankly be more concerned about fragmentation in that area rather than fixation on Javascript. The way I see the potential of a DartVM is the same as OdinMonkey+asm.js. Dart compiles to JS, but DartVM will run it slightly faster, but it will always work on all browsers. Likewise, asm.js will work on all browsers, but will always run faster on OdinMonkey. Both Mozilla and Google have VMs that potentially bifurcate performance across browsers, but still produce outputs that can run (albeit slower) The concerns you should have about Google misusing Dart I think should really be about Google misusing market share. It's not really Dart per se that's the issue, it's the fact that if Chrome is the dominant browser, Google can drop anything they want into it, not just Dart, but any APIs they want.
- pcwalton 13y ago
  The asm.js comparison is a false equivalence. It is not possible (without explicit effort, e.g. checking the UA string) for Web authors to ship asm.js that does not work in Chrome, because asm.js is just JavaScript. With Dart, Web authors may end up not shipping the JS fallback, or not testing it, thus locking the Web into Chrome. That is why turning on the Dart VM for Web content would be a problem.