Google Dart native on WebKit?

http://www.grobmeier.de/google-dart-native-on-webkit-08122011.html

by grobmeier • 15 years ago

35 46 15 years ago

hasmoo2• 15 years ago

What happened to Google's motto "Don't be evil?". Obviously they are trying to balkanize the web with non-standard technologies again.

melling• 15 years ago

Why would this be evil as long as Dart remains an open standard? Making it run better on their platform would incentivize the adoption of Chrome and Dart.

Getting near native performance in the browser would help take web apps to another level. Photoshop in a browser, for example.

hasmoo2• 15 years ago

Open standard? Dart is neither a standard nor designed in an open process.

ianso4• 15 years ago

Hum, I think the problem is that Dart may be technically open source, but it's not a standard. In addition to that you can publish the source but being truly open involves more than that: see the open governance index for an example:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/08/android-is-the-le...

It involves things like multi-vendor support, open project management & roadmapping, standards bodies where applicable, etc. These are all things Dart doesn't have.

davidu2• 15 years ago

You've forgotten your history.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

And don't think it's not possible, a number of MSFT folks who employed this strategy are now in leadership roles at GOOG.

BrendanEich4• 15 years ago

What open standard do you mean?

Clue: open source != open standard. Code overspecifies badly. Any implementor who cannot or will not use the (evolving) Google code would have to reverse-engineer the "interop spec", which is less specific than the C++.

dman• 15 years ago

I propose googles new motto - "Quasi open"

supersillyus• 15 years ago

If this qualifies as "evil" to you, you have a much broader definition of evil than I do.

ianso4• 15 years ago

From reading that email exchange I think the answer to your question is a definite "no" :-)

Aside from that, Google seems to be arguing that 1) there exist languages that compile to EcmaScript, so 2) single-vendor VMs in browsers is now OK. I'm being harsh here but that is the essence of it and it makes no sense at all.

nigma• 15 years ago

Flashback from 1996: Internet Explorer 3.0 with support of VBScript and JScript (reverse-engineered JavaScript) released.

Notabene it also featured CSS, ActiveX controls and Microsoft Java VM with Java Applets - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_3.

dmethvin2• 15 years ago

There was even a PerlScript plugin that you could use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PerlScript

est• 15 years ago

And ActivePython via ActiveScripting. Python could even run in ASP

cjfont• 15 years ago

As it has already been mentioned several times before, the lengthy process of adopting a new technology as a universal standard (via RFC, W3C, etc.) is a necessary evil which has greater advantages to developers/users than a single company going commando with their own great idea. Does Google think Dart deserves an exception to this? Most likely they are seeking a head start at the risk of others not following (as Brendan Eich has already stated Mozilla won't comply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982949).

Edit: Added link.

dmethvin2• 15 years ago

> developers don’t need to use toolchains

Sorry I don't get this. If Dart is delivered to the browser in source form, you'll still want script compressors and/or tools like Closure Compiler to eliminate unused code. Even if Dart is delivered to the browser in bytecode format you'll need a toolchain on the backend--and you'll still need symbol tables for client debugging.

If anything, the toolchain and project setup will be more complex for Dart developers if they want to support all browsers. They'll need to create one set of files for Chrome with native Dart and cross-compile to JavaScript for all other browsers. Then they'll need to conditionally include one set of script files or the other.

dchest5• 15 years ago

HTML5 specifies "type" attribute for "script" tags http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

  The type attribute gives the language of the script or format of the data.

I see no reason why some WebKit developers want to restrict what languages people can add by technical means. If there's a political reason to restrict it, they probably should discuss it within W3C and remove "type" attribute if they come to conclusion that JavaScript is the only language allowed.

ianso4• 15 years ago

From the perspective of the WebKit team, I think it would be about spending a lot of time and effort to support something that isn't part of their core mission, the standardised web.

It would also saddle them with an extra maintenance & support burden for the foreseeable future, to the strategic benefit of nobody but Google.

I think the original conversation was hampered by a miscommunication - it was never made clear whether it was just about hacking on a custom version of WebKit, or about adding Dart support to WebKit based browsers.

dchest5• 15 years ago

Let me quote the relevant paragraph from their goals in full:

  Standards Compliance

  WebKit aims for compliance with relevant web standards,
  and support for new standards In addition to improving
  compliance, we participate in the web standards community 
  to bring new technologies into standards, and to make sure
  new standards are practical to implement in our engine.
  We use regression testing to maintain our standards compliance
  gains.

Clearly, one of their goals is to help bring new technologies into standards, as evidenced by first implementing CSS animations, transitions, and transforms, and other various -webkit- things, and then submitting them to standard bodies. Plus there are some code paths in WebKit that only apply to OS X Dashboard, which are really the maintenance burden, given that some OS X relevant bugs are kept in Apple's closed rdar system (I know this because I helped find a bug in canvas). I see no problem if Google will maintain their code -- at least, we'd be able to see bugs in an open bug-tracker.

Why restrict innovation only to certain areas?

MatthewPhillips• 15 years ago

Do you think WebKit should include VBScript bindings as well?

It's pretty transparent what Google wants here; anyone who forks WebKit (ie everyone not named Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft) to get Dart by default. Adding the VM is just a small additional step.

dchest5• 15 years ago

They are _not_ adding Dart into WebKit, they are adding the ability to add more languages.

soc882• 15 years ago

Would have been interesting if Dart wouldn't have been such an atrocious, bad joke of a language.

18pfsmt• 15 years ago

Without explaining how Dart is,"such an atrocious, bad joke of a language" this comment simply adds nothing to the discussion. I would, however, be interested to read your critique.

soc882• 15 years ago

They combined the worst parts of Java with the worst parts of JavaScript.

- Verboseness

- Patterns

- No type safety (combined with that dishonest “optional typing” non-sense)

- No traits (didn't they get the memo that single implementation inheritance didn't work out?)

- Map being no Iterable

- No HOFs in the collection library

- nulls even for primitive types, ...

I don't like superlatives, but I'm pretty confident calling Dart the worst language I have seen.

The only mistake they missed are probably Checked Exceptions.

dchest5• 15 years ago

You can add yours if these patches will be accepted into WebKit.

wvenable• 15 years ago

I'd say Dart doesn't even have to be atrocious -- it's just simply not that much better.

kenny_r• 15 years ago

Dart may not be a standard yet, but both the Dart language and the Webkit source code are open.

Comparing this to Microsoft and ActiveX is an unfair comparison, imho.

2 things can happen: either Dart falls flat and this has no implications to anyone, or Dart becomes a major success and nothing is stopping IE, FF or Opera to writing their own implementation based on the open specification and code.

I fail to see the problem.

jashkenas• 15 years ago

Instead of this blog post, read the original thread:

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...

"WebKit branch to support multiple VMs (e.g., Dart)", halfway down the page.

In particular, some of Oliver Hunt's responses:

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2011-December/...

kombine• 15 years ago

Please give us a proper VM like .NET(Mono is a good candidate), Java, Parrot or whatever instead of yet another crap language(both Dart and JS are shit). Provide a VM level binding layer to the DOM, and everyone will be happy. Really, I didn't expect that a company like Google will be so stupid to do so.

ootachi• 15 years ago

It was already tried, through Java and LiveConnect. It was criticized as bloated and slow, and was eventually removed.

draegtun• 15 years ago

Mozilla did donate $10k to The Perl Foundation back in 2007. I think it was mainly a philanthropic action to help Perl6/Parrot. However they may also be eyeing a future possibility for hosting their Firefox languages on top of the ParrotVM.

ref: http://www.mozilla.org/grants/perl-foundation.html & http://www.parrotblog.org/2008/09/final-report-for-mozilla-f...

azakai• 15 years ago

> It looks like Dart is going to become native on the WebKit Browser.

No, the actual WebKit mailing list shows the exact opposite. Opposition (mainly from Apple) was quite strong, and it looks like Google will not be able to do this as a WebKit branch.

Instead, it will be a branch somewhere outside WebKit apparently. In that respect it will be like several other Google-specific technologies that are in Chrome but not WebKit, like NaCl and Pepper.

pilif• 15 years ago

So. Adding stuff like the canvas tag (added to webkit to display dashboard widgets) and CSS transforms (ditto) is ok because they were going to submit them as standards anyways.

But adding another language besides JS is not ok because that would be bad for the web.

Now, personally I don't care about dart, but I know that I had the same bad feeling back in the day when Safari learned the then nonstandard canvas tag than I have now when it should learn the nonstandard scripting language.

I do find it hypocritical though to allow one and disallow the other.

kevingadd• 15 years ago

It should be pretty clear that Dart and Canvas are entirely different matters. There is very little about the two that's similar, beyond trivial things like how they both began nonstandard.

Every browser vendor at times adds new tags or attributes if they think they can improve the web as a whole. When possible things are vendor prefixed, but still, it's something all the vendors do. It's the only way to get that technology into customers' hands.

Even though the canvas API is arguably a bad design, it certainly gets the job done - and nobody else stepped up to solve the problem before Apple did. It also made it into standards relatively quickly, and was implemented by other browser vendors pretty easily.

wwweston• 15 years ago

Was there any standardized feature out there that canvas displaced? Heck, given that Flash didn't do generated bitmaps and Java applets were largely dead by the time canvas hit, was there anything that it displaced? Or even a similar competing feature in another browser?

By contrast, Dart is squarely aimed at competing with a feature that's both a defacto and a formalized standard for web browsers. Not an abandoned and aging feature, either: JavaScript's proven far more capable than most of the industry gave it credit for, it's been growing and changing over time, and there's currently very active development, discussion, and collaboration underway to improve the language and its performance -- and expand the features exposed to it by various APIs.

There's a world of difference between those two situations. In the former, you're introducing a new feature a platform doesn't have yet. In the later, you're splitting the industry on an existing feature.

naner• 15 years ago

Would Dart require its own interpreter/compiler? I thought Google was just going to expand V8 to support it. Then again I know very little about compilers.

nathanwdavis• 15 years ago

They are NOT asking the Webkit project to add Dart. They want to get a pluggable VM system into Webkit. Then once that is in place, Google would not need to fork Webkit to get Dart into Chrome. And any other vendor that wants to be able to extend Webkit with another VM would not need to fork it either. It is clear that Google wants to get a Dart VM into Chrome, and I would rather that happen via a pluggable VM system than via a fork of WebKit.

justncase80• 15 years ago

Google is just going to do this whether the open web wants it or not. It seems like just giving them the cold shoulder excludes you from the conversation and when Google flies past and you're scrambling to catch up, no amount of bitching about lack-of-openness will help you.

Google Dart native on WebKit?

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