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13 năm trướcdiscuss

The point is that all this bullshit can live in USERLAND. Whether the browser comes with some prepackaged defaults is irrelevant. The browser as it stands is a horrible mishmash of application and platform. It should be law that web developers are forced to take a course in operating systems design before posting about platform design on sites like HN.

13 năm trướcdiscuss

Easy: provide an API for specifying text selection. Provide an API for sending things to the clipboard. You know, like every other programming platform does. It's probably about time I stopped getting irritated at how incredibly slow web development types are. There is _no_ reason for the browser to be a document browser mashed together with a distributed computing platform. Other than sheer stupidity, which there is plenty of to go around. The whole purpose of the kind of distributed computing platform that you have with asm.js, webgl etc is to build fucking applications. You know, like DOCUMENT BROWSERS.

13 năm trướcdiscuss

Rubbish. "Leveling" done in userspace (e.g. libraries) doesn't create a fundamental step back. The browser is just a horribly designed, and why, in spite of years of procrastination and denial - and HN is no exception - it has ultimately ended up as a virtual machine combined with basic primitives (albeit years too late and not done very well at all). My hellbanning on this site is a great example of why this site sucks. How many of the losers who hang out on this site all day collecting karma (as opposed to.. programming) called these problems? Practically nobody, and yet HN is deprived of my wisdom because I am too blunt and don't have an established account.

13 năm trướcdiscuss

I don't disagree with your comment except to say that sandboxed, client-side programming - done correctly - isn't a bad idea. But "good enough", whether you or I like it or not, is what we are going to get. I'm not endorsing this state of affairs, but I don't control reality.

13 năm trướcdiscuss

Yes and no. The choices are: (a) build a dumb terminal, or (b) build a platform for distributed applications. Currently, we have a dumb terminal with some programming features bolted onto the side. All kinds of concerns are mixed together. For example, portability and security of code execution are must be maintained by the Javascript implementation, whereas the only sensible way to do this is to use the VMM to sandbox code, then use a non-security-critical portability layer that can optimize some portable code as aggressively and unsafely as you like (not sure if this is what you're alluding to with your platform-dependent remark).

Sans the VMM part, which I only thought of a few years ago, I told people all of this (that once you commit to programming on the web you need a REAL programming platform) years ago, and was dismissed. Now that it's been half-done with asm.js, webgl, websockets etc being jammed in alongside all the dumb terminal concepts as well as all the horrible previous attempts to mix programming in (e.g. Javascript and the DOM), we're unlikely to get all the way there, because it will be "good enough".

13 năm trướcdiscuss

Snarky tone aside, care to explain what is inaccurate or unhelpful in this comment? There is a lesson to be learned from the debacle of browser design about ignoring what worked in the past. Does anyone seriously dispute, now that they have FINALLY constructed a VM for low-level code execution combined with some primitive APIs, that the browser as a document viewer with Javascript and DOM banged on is a completely and utterly BUNGLED design? Once you have a GOOD programming environment you can simply create your document viewer as an application inside it!

And now that it's 2013 I expect more than old ideas done badly. For example, at this point I would go further and say that the sandboxing in the browser should be handled by the VMM, not by the optimizer! The language should provide portability, not safety. That way optimizations can be as aggressive as you like without worrying about security. But hey let's throw a whole document browser and JIT into the trusted base of this distributed computing platform. I got nothing but ridicule and talk about how the "web" was special from people here on HN in the past when I tried to make these suggestions. Turns out this was utter garbage and the web is like any other programming platform - except designed and used by absolute chimps.

13 năm trướcdiscuss

Well, it's good to see that the browser developers have finally conceded total defeat on Javascript as the basis for their platform, and are now simply constructing a nice little low-level virtual machine for general compilation. Granted, they're still hypocritically trying to keep up appearances by sharing as much machinery as possible with their Javascript VM, but nobody's perfect, I guess.