Re: [Promises/Futures] Media Capture Task Force call

Le mercredi 05 juin 2013 à 17:47 +0100, Alex Russell a écrit :
> As part of our agreed work to help coordinate with WG's about
> idiomaticness and cleanliness of APIs, Anne and I joined the Media
> Capture group for a call today to discuss the adoption of
> Promises/Futures in their API. The minutes are here:
>
>   http://www.w3.org/2013/06/05-mediacap-minutes.html

Thanks for joining the call!

> I don't think it's stretching the case to say that the reception was
> something close to hostile, if not outright incredulous.

I think there was some regrettable hostility; I don't think it is
unreasonable for people to still be incredulous on Futures since they
haven't been exposed in the platform so far.

> Unlike some other groups which I've had the pleasure to work with,
> participants here seem to be worried that a relatively minor change
> (and a backward compatible one) is a major compatibility risk.

To clarify, I think most of the worry was around moving to a
non-backwards compatible change (i.e. support only the Future model, not
support both the Future model and the current callback model); for the
backward-compatible change, people seemed less worried, but more
inclined to wait and see before adopting an approach that is younger
than our APIs (and in particular that isn't shipping while our APIs
are).

> Perhaps further discussion of the acceptance of Promises across the
> W3C might ease their minds, and I was hoping those here with more
> experience might be able to guide the discussion to a less contentious
> conclusion.
> 
I think wider adoption of Promises would help; shipping implementations
would help too. 

As far as trying to find a less contentious conclusion, I've just
offered to develop and maintain a Future-fork of the spec, which would
let the group decide before moving to CR and removing implementation
prefixes whether a pure-Future approach was preferable to a callback
approach (possibly later complemented with a Future one):
http://www.w3.org/mid/1370448905.20417.349.camel@cumulustier

If the group feels that's realistic, then I would certainly appreciate
getting help in doing that.

Dom

Received on Wednesday, 5 June 2013 17:06:31 UTC