[webkit-dev] GlobalScript in WebKit

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 30 Nov 2009, Dmitry Titov wrote:
> 
> That also pretty much means if we won't do SharedScript, we'll need to 
> explore other opportunities toward efficient sharing of code and data 
> which does not make people to write a multithreaded UI as SharedWorker 
> solution would do. We have practically zero positive response to 
> SharedWorkers being used this way. Granted, this is "just one company" 
> but the limited unscientific poll kind of shows the direction...

The pushback on SharedWorkers at Google is because Google teams don't want 
to rewrite their apps to work with workers -- SharedScript lets them 
handle some of the cases SharedWorkers would get them, without having to 
rewrite as much code.

However, we should not be basing the platform's progress on transition 
cost avoidance of one company. Google can afford to rewrite GMail if it 
comes down to that. It is not in the Web's long term interests for us to 
design features that are optimised for the transition phase at the cost of 
the long-term health of the Web.

What we should be looking at is what API do teams prefer to work with when 
starting from scratch, because on the long term that will be the far more 
common case than transitioning from a legacy codebase. I don't think that 
our (Google's) response is representative here.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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