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points by hnedeotes 3 days ago | 0 comments
It's interesting that no-one talks about writing new systems and base languages that don't inherit anything from the current toolchain. That's the first step, then new architectures / fully open auditable hardware basis. With html you don't need any of this dependency chain. As long as you can write a browser you can be running on anything underneath.
[–] Zigurd 3 days ago
While it's hard to point to a fully top bottom initiative to create new platforms from the ground up, the Chinese appeared to be making an effort to reduce their non-native surfaces with things like Harmony OS.

A complete plan to reduce vulnerability from untoward influences is more feasible now with agent assisted engineering. You have to be carefully selective about what matters and what doesn't, or the cost and time balloon out of control.

[–] hnedeotes 3 days ago
That's also weird, in this reality, isn't it? You've got russians, chinese, etc, supposedly antagonistic to the western cultural hegemony, but then they just rely on western technology tool-chains. If I was guiding any of these countries a close to number 1 priority, technologically speaking, would be to create a completely independent software tool-chain. And talk through adaptors.
[–] pnt12 3 days ago
I think China uses NeoKylin, and Russia Astra Linux, both based on Linux.

I don't see China antagonistic to the west - they want autonomy, and don't share many of the values, but they're open to a wealthy West spending lots of money in Chinese goods.

Russia, at least its government, is a bit more, especially recently. But anyway, why reinvent the wheel when a battle tested FOSS is there for the taking?

[–] ben_w 3 days ago
At this point, a browser is a significant part of the way to being an OS virtualised inside the OS it's really running on. Complete with occasional leaks through the virtualisation to the real host OS/machine.
[–] hnedeotes 3 days ago
Yes, chrome for instance is more lines of code than the entirety of Linux, I think this just makes the case stronger for what I said. Although I understand why it might be so.
[–] tremon 3 days ago
What do you mean with "don't inherit anything"? Using the existing binary ABI is mandatory for interoperability so yes, in that sense every new programming language inherits something. Other than that, there's plenty of languages that have fully self-contained toolchains and runtimes, e.g. Erlang and Rust come to mind. Guix bootstraps its entire environment from a minimal Lisp implementation. There's also Microsoft's CLR and its entire ecosystem of programming languages, but I don't know if the runtime exists next to the Win64 C/C++ base or on top of it.

HTML is entirely the wrong comparison as it's a document format and not a programming language, and "as long as you can write a browser" is not a simple condition. Do we have any browser (even in development) that isn't written with current toolchains? Or a headless javascript runtime perhaps?

[–] hnedeotes 3 days ago
HTML as the "transport"/"dialect" to keep compatibility with the existing computational world. What I mean is from the ground up, no C, no erlang (which Im a big fan of in terms of application organisation), no Rust, no Javascript. Start from first principles, OS'es closer to uni-kernels, sane sharing/privacy policies, ability for instance to start an "executable" (already an abstraction tied to the current mode of software production, albeit a perhaps useful one) with a narrow set of scoped access. Then it only has to implement a browser/subset of it to parse HTML and it can "access" most of the relevant parts of the existing software world (internet). Ditch anything complex, if necessary make a browser that just uses flexbox, no other things, no backwards, compatibility, if you need compatibility buy a normal laptop with a normal OS, that comes with all the cruft, but design this new one from the ground up.

But I also don't understand why (without compatibility layers) a browser should be as complex, or remotely as complex, as currently, specially with all the knowledge in hindsight.

I'm not saying this is easy, doable, or whatever, but that was what I meant.

[–] stickfigure 3 days ago
> As long as you can write a browser

One does not simply "write a browser"...