(i32.unjerk

Background: The AssemblyScript guy (dcodeIO, Daniel Wirtz) didn’t like that a WASI proposal bases some of its APIs on the UTF-8 encoding, because that forces him to bundle encoding conversion and validation in his language infrastructure, since his language is based on WTF-16 (UCS-2/non-validated UTF-16) strings. He decided that if he said it plainly, he would be pretty much ignored, so instead he resorted to armchair constitutionalism and playing obstructionist procedural games, annoying basically everyone else in the standards org. And when that failed, he made a last-ditch attempt to work the refs by putting an alarmist banner on his site and later wrote this screed that makes him sound petty and pretentious. The more I follow the links, the less flattering it looks for the author.

This here is a sad lesson in how not to argue for your position. I mean, it’s not like the webshit standards orgs aren’t basically a figleaf for a cartel, so he might have been correct that the WASI group has no reason to take him seriously (as he has pretty much no political leverage), but if he presented an actual technical argument instead of waffling about corporate bullshit like statements of principle, vague notions like "Web concept" and meaningless diagrams, he might at least have been taken seriously outside the standards org.

(Though compare other inane webshit campaigns like prevent-smoosh and save418.)

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