oscargrouch

Its a great project and it would solve a lot of problems we face today for sure. But i fear it will suffer with a problem of adoption.

People had to learn HTML and HTTP back in the day, because it was the thing that would turn possible to transfer information through the wire with a platform called browser.

It was the same with the Windows API, VB, Delphi or Android and the iPhone is today.

People will learn that thing not because it will 'save the world', sure some will, but for more pragmatic reasons. So you also have to offer those pragmatic reasons to people, because those reasons are also important after all.

I know TBL was more or less on the "hippie" side of the web standards and it was very important to the web's core and foundation on the right track.

But i was not because of the HTML standard was great as a piece of technology, but the energy and the people that formed around it made it happen through the patient iteration over browsers, until browsers became a thing no one could avoid.

I'm saying this as somebody working more or less on the same problem, but who have taken a different approach..

The problem is hard because the state-of-the-art now is very sophisticated. You will have to compete with browsers and app platforms for mindshare, and i think you only can do it if you propose a new platform where people understand it as a better approach.

And i must say, the web alone as it is, is a broken foundation to lay out this sort of thing, for a lot of reasons.

So we need a new sort of browser, one that's so different that you actually wont even be able to call it a browser anymore.

This is what i'm trying to do. Trying to solve the same sort of problems, but with a different take than Solid.

But i must say its pretty hard, because you also have to offer, at least as a starting point, what browsers and application platforms already offer to developer. Along with this, there's a need for a incentive on the part of the user, the ultimate consumer of the thing. And this is also a hard problem, because you will need to offer something people want and dont have already..

I think i got this, but only time will tell. And even if the thing is somehow "right", even than you might suffer from lack of adoption as the incentives might not be enough and that 'killer app' that will make the platform boom never shows up.

Lets just pretend that this is working to filter good candidates.. even then good software have a lot to do with team work. Its better to have people who are experts in things that the product need to be good at, but also less expert in a certain field but that will do other parts of the product, than you have to manage the group work properly..

My point being, you need people with a myriad of skill sets, and some of them don't even have to do with expert knowledge needed in some areas.

Also you might have an expert in storage for instance that do poorly in certain tests giving he never needed to work with those kind of algorithms.

So in the end the company ends with the same type, the same kind of person, and how can you make a great team that needs people with different skills doing distinct stuff, if you optimized your hiring to filter for one particular type?

This sort of stuff is meant to leave the anarchists and the rule benders out of the company.

Its requires certain psychological threats to by guided to memorize and do all this stuff.

I bet a lot of people with the actual right skills would not pass into those exams.

It reminds me if a great lesson from the prince from Maquiavel, where he speaks about what sort of soldiers should be used and say that the mercenary soldiers should be the last resort, because giving they do not really believe into what they are doing, in the battle field they wont make the best soldiers.

Well, the filtering here will optimize for people willing to force themselves into this for a good salary, of course they can by chance get the passionate type, but they are not optimizing for it, and that's the point.

I rather work with people that are passionate about it, they are the ones that do the "impossible" things because they dont just do what they are told.

And this kind of people will at a certain point in their lives have nothing to show. But the curious, the creative, the people that learn fast, that are always hungry how can a company get them through this?

The screening is not optimized to find the best candidates, its just an arbitrary filter that will in the long term let some people that would be fundamental to the survival of the company out of it.

Sometimes its good to accept that the uncertain things are uncertain.

If i were them, i would find and train good "screeners", people with talent to spot talent and just let them do the job. Sometimes they will only have a hunch, giving their observations of things that escape most people of a particular candidate, and even without much to show of, they might be right.

Later the top screener's would help the new ones to be better at their job, teaching their tricks.

This is very subjective and personalized, and even if there might be some objective ways to train the screener's better, i think its just nuts trying to use objective tests to define a good hire.

I bet with you that there are a lot of "human gold" out there that would only be detectable only when its too late for the company.

Also its something that make things like React a little less relevant, by providing a powerful api which will perform much better.

Wouldn't say its the go-to. There are a lot of cool JIT's around that can be used as the backend to something. But this is one of the most simple, small and embedded that i'm aware of.

Have an eye on this project. It's the equivalent of Lua and SQLite of JIT engines.

The cell for instance, is a natural decentralized concept in the very fabric of life. Darwinism which will spread characteristics all over. The fact that a bird spread trees when he drops his food, or the bees spreading polen. Theres a lot of examples of this, and its the reason nature is so resilient, because it never centralize all the good stuff in one place, like we, the ones who like to control everything keep doing it to "protect" ourselves from nature.

And yet, we should embrace it, and learn from it instead.

I was with you except for the ending. I agree with you that the current nazis are not a real threath. But lets not forget that there's very smart people that are hungry for power and will do anything to take control of our lives for its own benefit. With them you can have a "neo-nazism" adapted for the reality of the country. Remember "war on drugs" and "war on terror"? Guess what, manipulation tatics using fear to control a large number of people for political gain.

Remember all the things Snowden and Assange bring back to light? first, with centralized control, it would never be possible to go against "the men". Second, that they describe how under Obama, you know that guy everybody likes and thinks do everything for the good of the mankind? the peace nobel prize? the first black president of US? how can he do wrong right?

And yet there was a lot of shady things going under his government, like spying its own people to resort absolute control under this "above good and evil" figure in a country who worship celebrities and big money (the winners).

My point being, its doesnt even need to be a nazi state, and can be a facade "rainbows and unicorns" kind of government, that do a good job into making people think everything is good, and their leader is some sort of Gandhi, that the real show, the nasty one, the one that even resemble the nazis, can happen behind the curtains.

Exactly. If you build institutions to centralized and control power, guess where the "bad guys" will concentrate their efforts to take control?

Nature itself is all about decentralization and development in a organic way and its the most resilient system we are aware of.

The only way to stop the nazists (or stalinists) of the future is by not letting all the eggs in one basket.

I can see a newspaper in 1994 writing a piece of how they dont want internet because this will give power to the ordinary man. "Internet will do more harm than good" they say. "Stick to whats working, centralized media with centralized control protecting you from all evil there is in the world". Its fine that you are afraid of the future, but the future will become present whether you want it or not, and i rather have a decentralized future beyond control of big techs and governments, even if this mean giving voice to hate speech.

The writing is on the wall about Google being the most powerful actor mandating what should die or live in the web specs. The monopoly would be bad alone, but to make things worse, they have a clear conflict of interests giving they are a powerful cloud computing operator that is very interested in centralizing, controlling and monopolizing data (which is the 21th century gold).

We can expect a "war" against anything really distributed from the big tech once some tech that would menace their centralized control over our data.

Have them dictating what can or cannot be in browsers will prevent new blue seas on tech, and i expect that if nothing changes the picture, even the startup scene will be pretty slow, giving it will have not much left to do, and the ones who find out a way, will probably be bought and left in a dump of vaporware.

Lets get a blue sea as an example, AI.. they have access to massive data no one have, and there's no way any AI product can compete with that in the long term.

So your browser being a "dumb" client that fetch and save everything in the cloud is the only thing they need, and the thing they will optimize for. And this is not in the users or devs best interests, much less the civil society as a whole.

Or its just a matter of not letting bad players to ruin all the game. Too many greedy blood suckers will drain and kill the cow eventually. The word here is balance to have a sustained long running system that can benefit the maximum number of people.

It doesn't need to be a false dichotomy between what it is now and stalinist Russia comunism.

Note: the blood suckers is not the whole of the capital market of course, they produce value. The problem is some players and some practices..

Or it might have something to do with academic appealing programming languages as Haskell also comes to mind where this was some sort of a ritual within its followers.

?

In portuguese 'vala' is the hole you dig on the ground or a naturally occuring one. Which can also be used as a synonym to "cova" which translates to "grave". I bet it will be hard to make a community for it here in Brazil or Portugal.

He/She was talking about developer ergonomics. And in that particular sense, while i have programmed in Swift and Rust, i completely agree with him/her.

In your disagreement you are pointing out how you think Rust is more _advanced_ than Swift. But this goes into a tangential topic, that was not what the parent was pointing out.

In developer productivity and ergonomics Rust is not far away from C++, and Swift is more akin to Kotlin, C# and Java, but it feels a little better like Typescript or Dart.

I wonder, why, so many times, Rust folks (Why to get tied to a tech, i also don't get it) gets so hostile and arrogant about the language, and to be fair this is some of the reasons i keep a certain distance from it, and i can imagine that im not the only one.

That could only do so because someone learned how to program in assembly even if not being payed for it. A good example of how making money not always equate to making value. There would be no Mark Zuckerberg without Rasmus Lerdorf. And if both were in the same room with me, it would be with Rasmus that i would like to talk to, because it doesnt matter that his net worth is peanuts compared to Zuckerberg, because from my perspective at least he created more value to society doing harder things than Zuckerberg.

With Tiktok, Youtube and the like, the comparison gets even worse when you compare the abyss of money making vs. value produced..

> This is why you see it starting to be used for "serverless" deployments.

For cloud like scenarios WASM probably will be a hit, given its safer and a good target for providers to let developers to create customized apps in any language they want.

Also there's centralized decision on which tech should be used. And this make the adoption of new tech much faster.

Sure its a portable IR, but is a very limited one and therefore it will be sub-optimal in a lot of scenarios compared to the traditional native applications.

In the web alone it will be sub-optimal to the state-of-the-art optimized javascript of today in a lot of cases, even having a much better performance in some special cases. And in the case of desktops, mobile, etc, this will make it even better for javascript applications, which will profit the most in this scenario, with hybrid apps (javascript + WASM).

Of course, the FAANG that control the platforms would love to limit more and have absolute control over the platform which will probably be the only native app allowed or that people will run. But the day WASM take the world and we are not allowed to run native applications anymore except the ones the walled gardens allow us to, will be a dark future compared to the freedom we once had.

Clean-room monopolized innovation and big tech mammoth's..

Flutter is what it is because of the quality of the engineering team behind the Dart language.

My point being that, Skia is great but is not the most important ingredient at play for Flutter achievements.

Also being a good choice will not pay for the bad choice that is choosing JVM as a primary platform for this which targets UI application consumers.

Your comment makes me think how WASM will go through this hype phase where people will think is a panacea to build things for the browser.. Hype gold rush all over again, but applications built on native or even javascript ones in the web or Electron will perform better in most cases. Of course companies will think its great for them to have only one codebase for every platform, but applications built with Javascript or Typescript for the web, with eventual WASM module here and there will be a better fit, so it will be risky to try to cut expenses and development there.

WASM will be awesome to bring great tech that is only available in native platform to the web, like FFMPEG, or to accelerate some code that uses a lot of math. But i think that people that are going way down into this WASM rabbit hole will have a wake-up call pretty soon.

WASM will open some blue-seas for sure, but they are limited to some niche scenarios and using WASM for application development for the web, desktop and mobile wont be one of them.

I feel this is a moon-landing like historical event without all the fireworks.

> - Uno renders using the underlying platform, uses native controls whenever possible, particularly for input controls. Avalonia focuses on using its controls, not native ones (although support for native controls is WIP I think)

This line remembers a constant pitch i see here on HN, where people ask for native controls to be rendered for multi-platform UI sdk's that i think go on the "faster horse"(Ford) sort of misdirection.

The problem with the 'faster horse' paradox is that the only way to make people forget about wanting a faster horse is by showing them the car.

I think a platform like Flutter get this right, as do HTML/CSS/JS, because theres no way to get really consistent if you have to use the platform native controls. It will also be messy for the developers, requiring a lot of effort and money to make things partially right.

I bet with you that most of these people asking for this use a Mac, and while Apple is more or less half of the market of US, in the rest of the world Apple have much smaller deploy base.

So sometimes, you need to be careful because even HN can suffer from a bubble social effect, that will misguide people that actually listen what they are asking for.

In the long term there's already a multi-platform UI paradigm there is set to win, and its called HTML..

Native UI platforms had a sort of comeback because of the iphone revolution, but in the long term, they will not be the winners, because Apple is doing the same mistakes they did in the eighties.

I think thats because WASM were not meant to serve those cases.

I see WASM more as an "accelerator". The big chunk of code continues to be Javascript that can consume WASM modules.

I dont think this case of whole complex applications in WASM will fly. It looks like ActiveX 2.0 all over again.

Of course some things will happen as full apps in WASM, but they are mostly tools people already use outside of the Web, so that particular crowd just want to reach the tool, it doesnt matter the medium.

You might like GN, which is Bazel like design but in C++.

Defaults to Ninja and its superfast.

https://github.com/timniederhausen/gn

Good. Will drop you an email.

Funny their choice over luajit's Dynasm, when you have something like Turbofan laying around.

The V8 Javascript interpreter can generate machine code dinamically targetting the host arch for each bytecode instruction..

You can define the target assembly directly in C++ without resorting to any specific machine code.

Maybe complexity or because they wanted to stick to C?

If you are interested in those properties, you might like something i'm working on that i'm about to launch.

Its nothing like COM, but a vision of what moderns browsers engines could turn into (focusing on the properties you have mentioned).

We should not let "them" dictate dumb clients (and apps) to us that consume from the fog that "the cloud" is.

This is a corporate trend that will take a lot of freedom from us, and if we let them have their way, it will be pretty hard to get us all out of this nightmarish future we are heading to.

I had a phase where i digged into a lot of codebases (with a bunch of C++) and i've learned to admire the way the code is layout in some of them, giving composing state in some of them is very hard to do it right.

In my experience, the stuff in C++ from Microsoft and Google are great resources to learn, so i would give a especial mention to (in order of C++ awesomeness):

  Dart VM
  Chakra VM
  V8 VM
  Chrome
  LevelDb
  WebKit
  (*) Doom 3 engine

* - Doom 3 is not very modern by today standards, but the way the code is composed, the things relate among themselves, etc, are a great resource of learning.

* - Didnt dig much into the most modern stuff from Mozilla, so i dont know how it is actually. Back in the day, there were a lot of legacy from their older codebases, so i dont now how the more modern stuff are, but im almost sure they might look great.

I disagree about this (stability/compatibility) being the point where it could trigger Microsoft.

First this is a bad marketing move for Microsoft while is taking years to scrap the image of bad and monopolistic player that wants to control everything.

So i think that the time they would at least consider to take legal action against React OS, would be when (in a possible reality) it start to gets popularity and big players started to ship things with it.

Giving it would be this third-party (lets say Dell or Lenovo) that would be sued for it, and giving all the dangers such a move would bring, its very unlikely that any CEO in its right would make this move.

So thats why i think is highly unlikely, giving ReactOS is so small, that it cant be considered a threat, except for a CEO's with conspiratory tendencies (A guy like Ballmer would probably do this stupid mistake).