Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SiVal | Hacker News Reader

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It's not WebKit that matters; it's Apple. Apple was also conspicuously absent from the original wasm announcement. Brendan Eich announced (paraphrased), "This wouldn't work without all browser makers buying in, and all of them are today announcing their intention to support wasm, including..." [insert a list of all the companies EXCEPT Apple].

Asked about the missing Apple, he responded that he was sure they were on board but hadn't submitted their written statement by his deadline. I asked why he would assume they were going to publicly commit to it if they hadn't. It would have taken a one-line statement.

He got very snippy and said that they were obviously just a bit busy getting ready for one of their regular public performances (maybe WWDC, I don't remember.) Yeah, sure, that must be it.

Their show came and went, and I must have missed the announcement. More shows came and went. If Apple ever publicly committed to supporting wasm, as all the other companies did on day one, I haven't seen it, but maybe they eventually did. (It would be easy for me to miss, so I'm seriously asking here.) Is anyone aware of any link to that public announcement of support, the one that we would have seen on day one if Apple hadn't been so busy?

If not, then there is another possibility. There are Apple people contributing to the wasm technology, both the development of the spec and the implementation in WebKit (I believe, but correct me if I'm wrong.) That would give Apple the option of supporting wasm if they ever chose to do so. I'm sure they want that option. And no public announcement of support means they are hanging on to their option to exercise their iOS/Safari veto power over this significant advance for open web apps (vs. vendor-controlled native apps).

Sorry, I don't recall being snippy, but I do recall you were pushing for me to "prove a negative", which is a fallacy. I can't prove Apple is committed to supporting WebAssembly and speak for them. But if you follow their bugzilla, you can see that the

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159775

dependencies are getting attention. Note also who is assigned to some of the recent ones: JF Bastien, formerly of Google (long-time PNaCl team member).

I may also have been unwilling to put people I know at Apple, with whom I'd spoken about WebAssembly in person at CurryOn in Prague (July 2015), on the spot. But suffice to say they're keen on WebAssembly and everything looks as on track as it can be, for a stealthy prima-donna company like Apple!

Who's a what now?

Back to bugfixing, you! :-P

Yeah, you were snippy, and caps-lock shouted at me when you mistook me for an Apple fan boy skeptical of wasm, when in fact I was a wasm fan boy skeptical of Apple, but as I noted earlier in another comment (just a few below this one, written before you chimed in here), I'm an Eich fan, too. I was so before you got snippy, and nothing has changed, because you're fighting for what I consider very important: the Extensible Web concept, giving us a much better app platform that has unprecedented reach and openness.

Apple's "courageous" willingness to enforce their own agenda and disappoint those with other priorities does not inspire confidence that Apple is fully on board with this wide-open web app platform, and that "no comment" is just how they express their enthusiasm.

But maybe they really are enthusiastic, and maybe they can hardly wait to announce their support for progressive web apps, too. Since I'm not in the smoky back rooms, I'll just have to wait and see.

But you and others who are working toward making these things happen, not just creating the tech but also working on the politics, should know that you're doing a valuable thing for the world, and lots of us appreciate what you do.

You must mean this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9736138

I don't think that counts as caps-lock shouting, as it's not all caps-lock. :-/

But whatever you call it, sorry about that. Re-reading it, I still think you seemed a bit over-aggro re: Apple, hence my mocking (again, sorry) -- but who knows? You could be right and they'll slow-roll or cripple WebAssembly.

I doubt it, based on what I know, but it is all speculation until they ship. Only thing to do is carry on and do what we can to up the competitive pressure.

You're very gracious, but whether I owe you an apology for being "over-aggro" or not, you don't owe me any, which you would have seen if you had seen my expression face to face. Imagine me looking down, smiling, shaking my head while asking, "yeah, but are you SURE you aren't just imagining the answer you want to hear?" and you'll get the right "feel". The caps lock business is just me ribbing you with a grin. The only serious part is that I'm grateful to you for trying to make something happen that I really want plus a bit of worry that it sounds a little too good to be true and not wanting to get my hopes up too much.

But you've answered my real issue ("how serious are they, really?") as far as you possibly can at this point, and I'm more optimistic than before, while still reserving a bit just in case....

And I really hope that more of the "extensible web" enabling technologies will follow sooner rather than later. Good luck and thanks.

The bugzilla is nice, thanks, but you completely lost me at "stealthy prima donna"...

Not an oxymoron, note well: the best prima donnas work their PR on their schedule, and suppress all others' attempts to reveal their secrets. Just like ol' Shiny!

The shiny company whose fine devices I carry. Did I offend?

> If Apple ever publicly committed to supporting wasm, as all the other companies did on day one, I haven't seen it, but maybe they eventually did.

They haven't made such a statement, but that's not unusual for them because their corporate policy is to "not make forward-looking statements". They do have representation in the WebAssembly W3C community group and do send representatives to the (rare) in-person summits that we've held. (Turns out the proverbial smoky back rooms do exist, it's just that smoking is not allowed).

This seems to be mainly an abundance of caution rather than obstinance or objection. It does seem that they have started working on an implementation, but we are careful not to put words into their mouths or read too much into that.

They were kept abreast of the planning this particular announcement and of late have ramped up their interest in settling design issues.

That is a very strange policy given the fact that they provide earnings guidance to Wall Street analysts.

Earnings guidance isn't necessarily a commitment to any particular technological roadmap.

I would take Eich at his word that there is support within Apple's browser development team. They have, after all, managed to reach ES6 compatibility faster than anyone else.

Apple's lack of public engagement probably has more to do with management's priorities. Apple's lack of community engagement is a problem: they drag their feet on WebView, block 3rd party browsers, and stymie adoption of open codecs like Opus and WebM.

However, Wasm can be polyfilled, so it can reach critical mass without Apple's explicit cooperation. At some point, not supporting Wasm will mean losing market share (and thus revenue) to Firefox and Chrome.

Apple has a general policy of not commenting about features in any future releases: they will rarely even say something currently in WebKit nightlies will be in the next release, so it's merely keeping with their typical form of not making any comment about future products/releases.

As such, I'd read absolutely nothing in to them refusing to commit to supporting it in a future release: that's just their normal behaviour, because per Apple policy they cannot. What actually are signs (whether they're implementing a given feature—typically publicly, whether they're sending detailed feedback on the spec, and what they're willing to say about implementing it off-the-record in private) are all there for WASM. I would be entirely unsurprised if Eich had off-the-record confirmation that it will almost certainly ship in Safari 11.

I would take Eich at his word

I'm an Eich fan, so what I DO trust is that he's doing everything he can to make this happen. I do trust that whatever he says is an attempt to help the web platform become the best it can be, meaning he's trying to help me.

I'll remain a bit skeptical about the literal correctness of those words until I hear what Apple has to say, but I'm encouraged by some of the other comments I see here.

I'm going to give Apple one potential benefit-of-the-doubt point here, despite the fact that I think there's also good reason to suspect they're not above succumbing to the incentives they have to hobble the web vs native.

If they're primarily about tablet and mobile devices now (lots of indicators that's the case), they're going to be concerned about battery life, performance, and other impacts on user experience. If history repeats itself, they're probably concerned about these things at a level of fussiness that other vendors often don't share. They might well not be on board with wasm for related reasons, or they might take longer to conclude it'll be OK, or work out whatever efforts make them feel good about it.

Or they might just lurve their walled garden a lot.

What does wasm have to do with battery life, and why would you assume its worse?

I expect wasm to be be less resource intensive than JavaScript, as GC's and such won't be necessary.

wasm may well be much more efficient and less resource intensive than JS. Seems likely enough, given the analogue of ASM on most machines.

But, then again, most people don't write ASM. They target it. So in practice, the performance of apps taking advantage of wasm will have a lot to do with compilers and the culture/choices developers bring to writing the software targeted at the browser-as-runtime.

They're concerned about not getting their 30% monopoly share of app store purchases if people use the web instead of native, not to mention the lock-in effect of native apps.

Apple is the new Microsoft (but worse than MS ever was).

Just like with the very late and crippled intro of webgl support in iOS Safari they are aftaid that WASM apps and especially games wriiten for WASM (e.g Rust has a WASM target now) will compete with the native apps/games, taking a chunk of AppStore revenue with it

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