Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixdimensional | Hacker News Reader

I think this quote speaks volumes - "WebAssembly has so far been a joint effort among Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and a few other folks." Sometimes I think maybe, just maybe the W3C and other web standards groups finally have some wind behind their sails.

It may have taken a while, but with all these individuals and organizations cooperating in an open space, we may finally advance yet again into another new era of innovation for the web.

I am really excited about this, much like others in these comments.

We have been beating around the bush to have a true assembly/development layer in the browser for a long time: Java applets, Flash, Silverlight, you name it - but no true standard that was open like Javascript is open. This component has the possibility of being the neutral ground that everyone can build on top of.

To the creators (Brendan Eich et. al) & supporters, well done and best of luck in this endeavor. It's already started on the right foot (asm.js was what lead the way to this I think) - let's hope they can keep it cooperative and open as much as possible for the benefit of everyone!

> WebAssembly has so far been a joint effort among Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and a few other folks

Is Apple participating?

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146064

Yes: "I’m happy to report that we at Mozilla have started working with Chromium, Edge and WebKit engineers "

https://blog.mozilla.org/luke/2015/06/17/webassembly/

This doesn't seem to necessarily imply that Apple is directly involved. But it's good to know that Safari should be included in this effort.

That WebKit issue about WebAssembly was filed by engineer working on "compilers and language runtime systems at Apple":

http://www.filpizlo.com/

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146064

Although that doesn't necessarily mean that Apple the company is involved, no?

Maybe the engineer who is involved wasn't able to obtain organizational signoff in time for Apple to put their name on the list of top-level endorsers of the proposed standard? Hopefully Apple can issue a statement later.

WebAssembly has so far been a joint effort among Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and a few other folks. I’m sorry the work was done via a private github account at first, but that was a temporary measure to help the several big companies reach consensus and buy into the long-term cooperative game that must be played to pull this off.

So, the effort to get buy-in from the big companies that matter has been going on for some time, and now that we've done that, here's the result: Every big company that matters except Apple.

It's not as though the list of the four big companies that matter is too long to reasonably be expected to name the fourth, and the name of the fourth is not webkit.org or Fil Pizlo.

So, it seems to be either an "Oops, we accidentally left one of the four out of this important announcement," or there is still enough of a problem with Apple that we decided not to delay the announcement any longer to wait for them.

You are assuming a false dichotomy. There's a third possibility: what with a big four-letter-acronym developer conference and lots of other spinning plates, the full buy-in to include the company name didn't make the deadline set to get everyone else on board.

Since Fil opened a webkit bug to implement wasm, I would at least hedge my false-dichotomy bet and avoid getting my mad on. Free advice, take it or leave it.

(The first paragraph is actually me telling you pretty much what happened. Same thing as with WHATWG launch in 2004, BTW. Does not mean "OMG there is something WRONG and only TRULY SHINY COMPANY noticed and OBJECTED". Yeesh.)

That's great news, thanks for the additional context. Apple and the web have a ..complicated relationship, so it means a lot that they have no known objections and are likely to endorse. It seems too good to be true that all the browser vendors would agree on something this beneficial to developers :)

The important question here is: has the github repo been made public?

How can we know what concessions these players have made or what kinds of collusion they have agreed to?

Shouldn't the Web be built in the open -- not subject to a cabal of corporate overlords who won't reveal their intentions or thoughts?

As long as Apple hasn't officially agreed to this, and you seem to have some sort of embargo on even referring to them by name, something other than full buy-in from them is still a possibility. This possibility makes me nervous, because I think wasm is just what the Web needs, and I don't necessarily trust Apple to have "whatever is best for the open Web" as a guiding principle.

As for "getting my mad on," you seem to have gone off on some sort of tirade at the end there implying--how ironic--that I actually wanted TRULY SHINY COMPANY to save us from wasm, and your caps-lock key seems to have gotten stuck when you banged on it.

Please accept my apologies for the ALLCAPs. You were nervous in a way that suggested to me the kind of fannish knee-jerking that I unfairly lampooned.

I hope you can relax. All will be clear pretty soon, I am certain. There's no need to be nervous. Well, no need to be more nervous than usual! ;-)

All is well between us, and I can't thank you enough for what you're trying to do. Here I thought ES6 was the best news of the year for Web dev, but wasm will beat it by far--as long as the long-term cooperation you (correctly) said it needs really comes through. It's hard to relax when we're soooo close to something this tantalizing, all but one have officially committed, but it has to be unanimous, and that one is not...yet...saying....

I'll watch these pages and let out a woot! the minute Apple officially makes it unanimous.

It has never been Apple's style to release a statement for situations like this.

Expect to see it implemented, sites like iCloud made to take advantage of it, performance metrics aka marketing collateral gathered and then a slide or two at an upcoming Apple Event with cheers from the audience.

Apple is a product company first and a technology company second.

Yes, lower in his post he mentions the JavaScriptCore guy.

Yeah, it amazing to see all the vendors working on this. Asm.js has momentum and dedicated support from Chakra and SpiderMonkey but this is actually going to be created, supported with tools and promoted by all the vendors.

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