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Comment by valleyer | Hacker News Reader

> three competing app frameworks won’t create it

> Apple splitting their resources to support AppKit, SwiftUI, and Catalyst probably doesn't help.

Yup. After years trying to coalesce development around AppKit (transitioning away from the original Toolbox API), Apple decided to ship the org chart and simultaneously maintain three different UI frameworks, none of them fully consistent with the others. Engineering labor was divided between them, and extra work was created due to interoperability requirements. All three were left worse off as a result.

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It struck me as a very mature move by Apple to do the two-pronged approach and launch both SwiftUI and Catalyst around the same time (they are for different purposes... greenfield projects vs. ports).

I mean it's the most obvious surface-level minimalist/designer/programmer impulse to want there to be only 1 way rather than 2, because it just overall feels more neat/tidy that way. That's the kind of impulse I heed a lot of the time. But in the real world and especially trillion dollar market situations like this, what's actually best to do is not necessarily that simple.

It's fitting with their historical approach to OS X development. The transition strategy to OS X was "If you're starting from scratch, use Cocoa (SwiftUI). If you're porting an existing Mac app, use Carbon (Catalyst)."

It's truly Google-like in its inconsistency and confusion for developers.

Google? Nah, Microsoft is the king of incompatible parallel UI toolkits.

The difference is, Microsoft doesn't abandon their old stuff as soon as something newer and shinier comes along. I can still write a Win32 app today, almost 30 years after NT 3.1 came out. Even more impressive, if I use an old-enough version of the compiler and stick to a functional subset of the API, the program will run on both an NT 3.1 box and a brand-new Windows 11 machine.

Try that in the Apple ecosystem.

lol let's not pretend that Apple has limited resources though. Apple has a very limited amount of core developpers (e.g webkit being abandonware) and they are probably mediocre on average but obviously this is artificial scarcity.

WebKit has had 32 commits to trunk in the last 24 hours (35 if you include 3 reverts).

[edit] source: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/commits/main

Webkit has 246,027 commits

gecko has 782,002 commits

chromium has 1,080,253 commits

To help you understand the magnitude/impact of this difference, a single 100K commit difference account for more human resources than a whole native GUI framework (e.g cocoa, gtk 72,090 commits, QT ~80K) has received in its lifetime now multiply that by 8 and you get an idea of how obscolete webkit is regarding human resources. They might ? have hired more devs recently but if true, it's already a decade too late.

finally the gradient is not closing.. ten time less weekly commits: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pulse https://github.com/chromium/chromium/pulse

Are you seriously going to make an argument on the relative investment each browser engine gets based on how many commits they have?

Are you seriously gonna ignore that pulse also shows the diffs (additions/deletions) and that corroborate with commit rate. Moreover I have expertise in web features, i have read a big chunk of chromestatus.com features and the gap between chromium and webkit is even bigger than the gap between chromium and gecko. Finally the most meaningful metric is: webkit: ~60 developers worked on it this week, chromium: >700 developers The gradient gap is pathetically big

...5 of which came from actual Apple employees. Putting it in perspective, the WebKit Open Source maintainers made more contributions today than the people who are paid to do so.

I’m not sure how you’re counting contributions, but well over half of WebKit commits come from Apple employees and (skimming the commit history) I see nothing that refutes that in the most recent commits. The majority of the other commits come from Igalia, with a handful of contributions from Sony, Google, etc. and then some random interested contributors.

Yes igalia, a google paid company

Why would apple self sabotage itself by not hiring and allocating good developers to their frameworks?

Mediocrity can be very hard to explain but it can be asked for many things at apple. Why does the richest software company on earth has made almost zero innovative software products nor technologies this decade? The only technical talent at Apple is making hardware.

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