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Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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