Why would I ever want to do this in my browser? I cannot think of a larger waste of resources except for pdf.js.
It's of course fine to ask what a project is for or how it addresses a specific concern, criticize substantively, and so on, but there should always be a baseline of respect for someone who tried something and put it out there.
Good thing it's open source then.
They interact with each other because of BEPs. This client is a prototype and if it's successful you'll have a whole new source of peers.
And before PeX was a BEP, before Vuze had a Mainline DHT plugin, it didn't interact with some clients either. Hell, even DHT [1] had to go through the same BEP process. Do you expect all software to start out complete?
No. I would expect a new torrent client to start with tracker announces and then peer communication.
Do you have any insight into the BT dev community as to whether WebTorrent is likely to be picked up in other clients?
I have no special insight but I think this is a really cool idea. What I do know is if they don't put up a BEP then it won't go anywhere.
It smells a bit like embrace-extend-exterminate to me, even if it's not intentional, it currently is a natural consequence of "claim to do X in a browser" without access to the underlying primitives necessary to do X in a standards-compliant manner.
In my opinion browsers need to provide thinner abstractions over posix apis (with the appropriate sandboxing and opt-in where necessary).
Sure, so don't support it. If no one supports the protocol or the app, then it will die. That's an acceptable outcome to some. I'm not saying anyone has to support it, I don't even have any vested interest in it. It's just an interesting project and I've spent far too long today on HackerNews defending it when I could be working on my own projects.
To me, it looks more like "Adding Bittorrent into Firefox is pretty much impossible, where can we start instead?"
>In my opinion browsers need to provide thinner abstractions over posix apis (with the appropriate sandboxing and opt-in where necessary).
NaCl & Emscripten should get you some of the way there.
Maybe with better browser-native interaction? A house starts with its foundation.
And calling it a torrent client while knowing that it isn't interoperable still leaves a bitter taste with me.
> NaCl & Emscripten should get you some of the way there.
they don't provide sockets or filesystem access as I understand it.
OK, but that doesn't change the important point.
Your comments make it clear that you know quite a bit in this area. Instead of venting annoyance, why not teach readers some of what you know? If you did so without snark you could add a lot of value to a thread like this. People are obviously interested in the topic or they wouldn't have upvoted the story to #1.
> or they wouldn't have upvoted the story to #1
The cynic in me says that happened because this is "X in Y lines of javascript, in the browser!". The one thing that is guaranteed to catch the attention of people here is reinventing the wheel--poorly.
That said, the browser will not return to only acting as a display conduit with no interactivity despite what some people would like to see...
If you want a better platform than the browser for server-driven interactive applications not requiring you to install extra applications, then build one. To date, there hasn't been a better, more open option.
And in doing so, a critical vulnerability:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2015-7...
However I think you would have more success in A) gaining an understanding of what someone is trying to achieve / what problem they might be trying to solve and B) sharing your likely very valid point of view / experience with others if you change the way you communicate your reply.
The way you worded your reply could be hurtful to the person that came up with the idea and spent their time to try and create something from it.
I'm sure your intentions are good, probably a mix of wanting to educate people, share your experiences and show heartfelt frustration with certain types of software trends or implementations.
I think it would be more constructive and less potentially hurtful if you focused on talking about how you could see issues with using X to do Y and perhaps offer a suggested alternative path to look at if they're interested.
Tldr; If someone is demoing their ideas or product - friendly constructive criticism and feedback is very important and valuable. Keep comments positive and your words will have more of an impact.
As for software trends: all hope is lost.
Sad but true. The rate at which software quality is decreasing is increasing all the time. e.g. even though I haven't upgraded my phone's OS for over a year (I have tried, but the newer versions are always broken in some important way!), Google pushes out updates to Play Services that I can't block that cause crashes, dead batteries, broken apps and features, etc.
This is why, more and more, I gravitate toward not only FOSS software, but stuff like Emacs that Just Keeps Working. It seems like hardly any software developers care anymore about making things that actually work. Imagine if modern cars broke as often as most computer software does. (And as cars come to depend more on complex software, they are going to get less reliable--just as they were getting to be very reliable.)
While JavaScript is probably slower and use much more resources, it's not always the case.
I would also argue that bit-torrent doesn't take up much resources, at least when only seeding a few files, I guess you would have to seed thousands of files for performance to matter.
The IRC-like chat on Social Savannah will run up your browser memory and until you run out and crash. pdf.js (in firefox), as mentioned, starts sucking down cycles and bytes with just intel reference manuals open.