Is there a problem with Peter Thiel or is their problem that somebody accidentally leaked the front end source code? The first I would understand, though I would find it silly. The second I don’t understand. Front end code is neither meant to be secret nor meant to be trusted. Who the hell cares if your users can see it?
Can an argument be bade that CSS only exists becuase javascript failed to develop a styling component to displace it?
I like to think webassembly is the right track. But ECMAScript and CSS alike need(ed) to devolve into a simpler byte-code like intermediary language syntax.
Browsers supporting complex languages has always been a bad idea, what they need to support is capabilities, and access and security primitives. wasm hasn't displaced javascript, because afaik, the wasm spec for browsers doesn't require them to implement javascript (and ideally, CSS) via wasm.
Instead of distilling, simplifying and speccing CSS and Javascript, browsers caked on layers upon layers of complicated features. The idea that browsers should define and regulate the languages developers use to write front-end code needs to die.
The complex parts of JavaScript are the semantics, not the syntax. You could reasonably easily spec a bytecode for JS to get rid of the syntax part, but nothing would change in the complexity (almost all modern engines parse to bytecode as the first step and operate on bytecode from then on).
If you wanted to implement JS in wasm, you'd either need a bunch of wasm extensions for JS semantics (dynamic object shape, prototypal inheritance, etc), or you'd need to implement them in wasm from scratch and basically ship a JS runtime written in wasm. Either that, or you need to change the language, which means de facto adding a new language since the old JS still has to stick around for old pages.
I admit I don't have depth of knowledge with how JS and Wasm work behind the scenes, but you can already compile JS to wasm. Forgive the ignorance, but what am I missing here? When you compile JS to wasm, aren't the semantics and language behaviors already addressed?
My understanding was that things like DOM manipulation APIs would need to be (and are) exposed to the WASM runtime so that the JS-to-WASM compiler could do all the right bytecode "linking".
My idea is that if JS itself was require to in WASM, and native JS support didn't exist, the complexity in browsers would be reduced dramatically. And developers will be free to use different languages. Browsers will focus on APIs instead of language semantics. no more V8!
You can't currently "compile JS to Wasm", you can compile a JS engine (likely written in C++) to Wasm and run JS inside that (almost certainly at lower speed). So instead of "no more V8", it's closer to "ship V8 as part of the website, instead of part of the browser". Exposing DOM APIs to Wasm is a completely different question, though even those would actually have to be new APIs with a new API design that works for Wasm, since the existing DOM APIs are effectively defined in terms of JS objects being passed around.
I didn't know this, thanks for explaining. If DOM APIs could be reworked for wasm support, and JS can work with those APIs, that would suffice. It won't get sites off normal JS any time soon. As far as speed, is it an optimization problem? I'd think just running bytecode is faster than interpreting a script. It doesn't need to be backwards compatible with existing JS code, it just needs to be possible to write front end code in JS for WASM. Migrating to the new approach could be similar to migrating away from Flash, ActiveX and Applets, but at a much larger scale.
10-20 years from now, is it really ok to be stuck with JS and CSS? The complexity is compounding, ever newer webapi's get encoded as JS APIs, and the dependency mess will only increase. Browsers are about as complex in some ways as an operating system. If we think about the world in terms of decades, what is the plan? This is a very serious issue, because of how much the world depends on browser tech, and effectively, Google is the arbiter and overseer of that technology. I don't think this will work out well, unless there is some timely foresight in the architecture.
> CSS only exists becuase javascript failed to develop a styling component to displace it
there is no sortage of projects that do it (especially during the react era, people wanted to get rid of both html and css) but they get pushed down by dogma/inertia mostly. There was iOS constraint layout language ported to js. Seemed pretty cool, but the guy behind it decided to give up and everyone was like welp we tried, didn't work.
It sounds like the consistent pattern is the requirement for browsers to support it. If browsers supported intermediary languages instead, that might be ideal?
Well, redstone was designed to be able to do logic from the start. The first version had wires, a couple input options, a couple output options, and NOR gates, already updating on a global clock. The ability to make computation circuits was clear.
So this is just LZ with a pre-populated window? Any backreferenceing compression can be used this way - just prepopulate the backreference history on both client and server up front and off you go. Why is this new?
Per the article, it’s new to browsers, not compression generally, due to the lack of standardization. the future is already here, just not evenly distributed.
My point is that this is the norm, not the exception in legal systems. It's good for laws to be clear cut and unambiguous, but in practice the world is not, and laws gets interpreted as courts use them.
Yes — a very clear and unambiguous “speech is allowed” is the correct solution. If your feelings got hurt, you can cry to your mommy. The world does not owe anybody comfort.
> People Are Being Thrown In U.K. Prisons Over What They’ve Said Online.
Hmm yeah, let's see.
> The recent arrest at London’s Heathrow airport of a noted Irish comedian, Graham Linehan, for the “crime” of three politically incorrect tweets vividly illustrates how far Britain has fallen.
Oh, Graham Linehan being brought up again. Curious, what did he say that landed him in trouble?
> If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
Ah yes, poor little Graham got arrested for only inciting a little extrajudicial violence. Poor guy, he was only being 'politically incorrect'! Truly free speech is under assault and you just get jailed for posting memes in the UK.
lol no wonder, you have no other choice but to have your communications monitored for compliance regarding acceptable social norms. I bet if you posted the alternative opinion you'd be put to death.
I never said I want them out. I just don't support the prison system in its current form, or any excuse for slavery. Meanwhile, the root causes of the violent crimes go altogether unaddressed which is not appropriate either.
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