Google for Developers
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 4 months, 2013–2015
31:31 · 35K views · Apr 4, 2013
A Google Developers Q&A in which Blink engineering leads and the PM answer the community's top questions about the new Blink rendering engine forked from WebKit.
HN cited it for direct statements from the Chrome team about the WebKit split, Dart integration and Blink's direction.
4 comments from Hacker News
> That's me disliking a set of bad arguments, not me disliking Dart. I stand corrected. Yes, I've read all the memos and watched all the videos, including this one when I knew Dart wasn't going to make it into Chrome for the first time. I knew it by Blink engineering lead Darin Fischer's reaction when asked about Dart [ this video at 17:25] To me it looked like he laughed and sort of scoffed, then he and another member talked Dart down. Maybe it is a failing of mine to look at emotional content when considering issues, but doing so sometimes imparts useful information. At one point I was passionate about Dart because I thought it hit the sweet spot between JavaScript and Java applets in the browser with optional typing and generics. It turns out TypeScript hit that spot well enough and Anders was right about that. I understand your frustrations about opportunity costs and lost effort that could have gone into JavaScript, but there is another possibility -- and this is just my opinion, which I voiced at the time -- that the Dart team was more focused on Dart on the server as a Java replacement. This was at a time when Oracle's lawsuit with Google over the Java interfaces was a big question. I thought Dart might be a plan B on the server and why Dart2js was not getting the attention I thought it deserved. The JavaScript output on the client was unreadable, very large and much of the disdain for Dart from JavaScript devs was for this reason (17000 lines for a "hello world" if I rec
A number of the members of the Chrome team. If you watch the announcement from when Blink hit, they did some developer talks. When asked about the integration of Dart into Chrome, it was fairly obvious that some of the guys didn't want Dart in there [0]. But at the same time, a high-level direction is being set to try and get Dart added. Google employs a LOT of developers. A lot of those developers feel the same way members of HN does, that we don't need a language to replace javascript. Google is using their weight in the web world to try and get a new/alternative language added. As long as Dart isn't completely shoved down our throats, I'm willing to give it a try. I think there is enough opposition within Google to make sure that Dart will at least have to live in peaceful co-existence with Javascript. Google is pretty realistic that it'll be many more years before they can even have a chance of getting other browsers to add the DartVM. Heck, Chrome doesn't have it yet (outside of the Dartium build which has some fun memory leaks). [0] this video
A request for clarification on why they refused was posed to a Chrome engineer in todays Blink Q&A ( this video ), and according to him the request for integration came shortly after Chrome was released, and the reason for their refusal was the sheer scale/complexity of the task. In light of this, your initial "if Google had only upstreamed their multiprocess support...we almost surely" and reiterations on this point within the thread do seem a bit like PR sleight of hand, since out of context it implies willingness to do so was the only issue on their part.
I get my impression from this video this video Skip to &t=17m26s and you can hear them talk about it. Judge for yourself.