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Comment by krupan | Hacker News Reader

Let this be a warning to young developers tying into proprietary platforms.

(Not one mention in TFA of http://homestarrunner.com, for shame)

That's not fair. There was a point in time that if you don't use flash for web games, you just weren't doing web games. HTML was not up to the task.

You could avoid being tied to proprietary platforms now but there is a good chance you're just leaving the market to someone else.

Running another program in a rectangle in your web browser can hardly be called “web”.

You accessed it on the Web, in your Web browser. For pretty much everyone, that's the definition of "Web" .

Does WebAssembly running in a <canvas> tag count as "web"?

Maybe. However, wasm will eventually tightly integrate with the DOM.

Yeah it seems like people don't understand this. We've had an era of JavaScript dominating web standards. I also don't think people realize this is only the start of wasm...

And open platforms, if browser vendors decide to break your content. Hard to say at this point whether HTML5 games will end up lasting any longer than Flash games did. Openness is valuable but you also just have to look at whether the platform owner(s) are going to stick around (Google isn't going anywhere, at least) and whether they have a long-term commitment to the products and APIs they put out there. HTML5 is starting to look like a churn nightmare between arbitrary changes to audio policy and major features getting shut off due to threats like Spectre.

Adobe was a very bad platform steward regardless, but 5 years from now it may turn out that Win32 was a better choice in terms of developer investment/maintenance than HTML5 for many developers. iOS has had an incredible upkeep cost for indie game developers who released products on it early on, and we've seen many developers opt to pull games from the store instead of spend time+money updating them.

Hopefully WebAssembly helps fix things here by providing a much cleaner compile target (with well-defined APIs) that has good performance. Moving to HTML5 had a major performance hit for people previously using Flash or Unity's plugin but most of that hit is gone once you use wasm.

This was the only good option at the time. One alternative was for people to pass .exe files around. That was a great way to spread viruses. Another alternative was Java applets which was a great way to lock up a browser. JavaScript didn't do shit in the the Netscape and IE 4/5 days. So was everyone supposed to make Windows games or just give up? Would that have been better?

Let this be a warning to young developers tying into browser platforms.

For all the openness of web standards, let's remember that browsers are proprietary.

If a browser vendor decide to do something (whatever it is, good or bad), there is pretty much nothing users or developers can do, we saw it with IE6 for a long time, we now see it with Google Chrome too.

AFAIK browser plugins were considered part of those web standards (see [0] and [1])

[0]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/infrastructure.html#p...

[1]: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/system-state.html#plu...

> proprietary platforms

... as in Windows, MacOS (to a much less extend), PlayStation, XBox, Switch (and/or other Nintendo platform)?

This warning makes no sense.

how is MacOS to a much less extent?

Actually you're right... it isn't.

I was thinking in term of player base size. But now that I think about it more, player base size makes no difference in the context of this conversation.

is unix proprietary? macos is based on unix

No, but OSX certainly is. I doubt it's viable to write games without using any of the proprietary APIs.

You can write games just fine using OpenGL (and SDL for windowing/inputs/audio/etc).

For now, but in the next version there will probably be no OpenGL support.

Doubt it. There are still dozens of frameworks that still link to OpenGL, and Apple’d need to drop or update them all in a year. Most likely it will remain on the system for at least a couple years.

You'll still be able to use MoltenVK to get Vulkan support, and SDL will still work for windowing and everything else.

I was just referring to the "lesser degree" of being proprietary

OS 10.4 was the last version to support classic mac apps - https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-confirms-no-classic-support-...

Mojave is the last version of OSX to support 32 bit applications ( https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/06/05/mojave-is-apples-... )

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Essentially, all software has a end of life. I'll grant that Apple has done work to maintain their software across major processor and operating system changes, but at some point that support is dropped.

Yes. Well, since 2002 some old versions aren't, but v7 onwards is. macOS is based on XNU and NeXTSTEP, which are based on Mach and BSD, but macOS is not solely a Unix system and few use it as such. In fact, if you were to make a program using only the FLOSS unixy parts of macOS, porting it to other POSIX systems would likely be trivial. I hardly even count that as "macOS software" in the exclusivity sense.

macOS being unix-based doesn't make it less proprietary. z/OS is Unix certified and proprietary as balls.

People forget that actual Unix descendants are really mostly proprietary. Linux and BSD are what we often think of today, but those are really more "Unix-like's" and many of the "true" Unixes tend to be proprietary systems like AIX, HP-UX, IRIX (now deceased), z/OS etc.

The bare core of macOS (Darwin) is open source, but pretty much everything people identify with macOS is proprietary code built on top of Darwin. You used to be able to get standalone distributions of Darwin (maybe you still can?) that people built from Apple's source and they were almost completely unrecognizable.

It's only completely unrecognizable because Darwin is the kernel and userspace. The UI is whatever you want it to be.

Right, that's my point. What most people associate with "macOS" is actually the stuff layered on top of Darwin, which is mostly proprietary. It's not just the GUI, it's also a lot of the frameworks and libraries as well.

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