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> The question then becomes who would fund such a thing Historically new web engines came about when a new challenger wanted to have a stake in web standards d
by polyglotfacto 8mo ago
> The question then becomes who would fund such a thing
Historically new web engines came about when a new challenger wanted to have a stake in web standards development. The way it happened was never from scratch but with a fork of an existing engine. Last time this happened was with Google. The reason, I think, was wanting to evolve the web into an application-like platform(HTML5), and a new architectural idea: multi-process.
The person who was in charge of that effort is now at OpenAI.
Today there are also projects like Ladybird and Servo which follow a different model: started from scratch and driven by interest from a developer community. But so far neither has users in the real-world, and so they haven't had an impact on the Web in the way Chromium has, yet.
Already today, both development models could benefit from the productivity gains of AI; in 2029 the game may have changed entirely. I can imagine a combination of math(TLA+ like I've done at https://github.com/w3c/IndexedDB/pull/484 https://github.com/w3c/IndexedDB/pull/484), web standard in their semi-formal English, and then some further guidance in terms of code architecture(through a conversation-like iterative loop), and see a Fastrender-like approach that actually works. Humans would still be the ones defining and solving all the hard problems, but you'd be typing a whole lot less code...
I'm the one who was driving the efforts to start experimenting with AI in Servo, which was cut short by https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379 https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379
I've been using AI on side-projects ever since, and in those I don't type any code by hand anymore and end-up doing things I would not even contemplate(due to time constraints) without the use of AI.
Example: https://medium.com/@polyglot_factotum/tla-in-support-of-ai-code-generation-9086fc9715c4 https://medium.com/@polyglot_factotum/tla-in-support-of-ai-c...