[dang]

Please don't post comments that are dismissive of new work. Acerbic swipes poison the atmosphere, and we want HN to be a place where discussion of new work can thrive.

It's of course fine to ask what a project is for or how it addresses a specific concern, criticize substantively, and so on, but there should always be a baseline of respect for someone who tried something and put it out there.

[J_Darnley]

It isn't new. I've seen this thing at least twice before. I seem to remember last time it even said that it couldn't interact with normal torrent clients.

[dang]

> It isn't new.

OK, but that doesn't change the important point.

Your comments make it clear that you know quite a bit in this area. Instead of venting annoyance, why not teach readers some of what you know? If you did so without snark you could add a lot of value to a thread like this. People are obviously interested in the topic or they wouldn't have upvoted the story to #1.

[J_Darnley]

I can't teach anyone anything. I have neither the knowledge, skill, temperament, or desire. People will continue to implement things in a browser, poorly, and there is not a damn thing I can do about it.

> or they wouldn't have upvoted the story to #1

The cynic in me says that happened because this is "X in Y lines of javascript, in the browser!". The one thing that is guaranteed to catch the attention of people here is reinventing the wheel--poorly.

[dang]

All you need to do to teach readers is to post comments with real information in them. If you can't or won't do that, you should at least spare everyone the comments without real information in them.

[voltagex_]

Yes, because it requires a BEP (http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0001.html) to be added as an "official" extension to BitTorrent. Eventually it will happen. I'd hope that by posting it again to HN, someone might add it to their list of things to do in their Infinite Free Time.

[the8472]

adding a BEP will not fix webtorrent, it will still be incompatible with µTP / TCP transport and even more importantly the DHT. It's shoving the responsibility of being compatible onto everyone else because browser environments are inherently crippled, they do not provide access to such simple things as TCP/UDP sockets and thus can never be truly interoperable with protocols that run on them.

It smells a bit like embrace-extend-exterminate to me, even if it's not intentional, it currently is a natural consequence of "claim to do X in a browser" without access to the underlying primitives necessary to do X in a standards-compliant manner.

In my opinion browsers need to provide thinner abstractions over posix apis (with the appropriate sandboxing and opt-in where necessary).

[voltagex_]

>It smells a bit like embrace-extend-exterminate to me, even if it's not intentional, it currently is a natural consequence of "claim to do X in a browser" without access to the underlying primitives necessary to do X in a standards-compliant manner.

Sure, so don't support it. If no one supports the protocol or the app, then it will die. That's an acceptable outcome to some. I'm not saying anyone has to support it, I don't even have any vested interest in it. It's just an interesting project and I've spent far too long today on HackerNews defending it when I could be working on my own projects.

To me, it looks more like "Adding Bittorrent into Firefox is pretty much impossible, where can we start instead?"

>In my opinion browsers need to provide thinner abstractions over posix apis (with the appropriate sandboxing and opt-in where necessary).

NaCl & Emscripten should get you some of the way there.

[the8472]

> To me, it looks more like "Adding Bittorrent into Firefox is pretty much impossible, where can we start instead?"

Maybe with better browser-native interaction? A house starts with its foundation.

And calling it a torrent client while knowing that it isn't interoperable still leaves a bitter taste with me.

> NaCl & Emscripten should get you some of the way there.

they don't provide sockets or filesystem access as I understand it.

[J_Darnley]

I already have many choices of client. All of which can correctly interact with each other. A new client come along and can't do that. Suddenly every other client is broken. Please, this client is broken and needs fixing.

[voltagex_]

>Please, this client is broken and needs fixing

Good thing it's open source then.

They interact with each other because of BEPs. This client is a prototype and if it's successful you'll have a whole new source of peers.

And before PeX was a BEP, before Vuze had a Mainline DHT plugin, it didn't interact with some clients either. Hell, even DHT [1] had to go through the same BEP process. Do you expect all software to start out complete?

1: http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0005.html

[MichaelGG]

By that logic though you can say anything is BitTorrent if it gets a BEP. IPX/SPX networking only? No problem, just needs a BEP! ;) You must admit it's certainly different to start off with a completely incompatible client, vs just a new feature. (I do wish WebTorrent well though.)

Do you have any insight into the BT dev community as to whether WebTorrent is likely to be picked up in other clients?

[voltagex_]

Well yeah, someone could propose IPX/SPX but it'd be unlikely to to get picked up.

I have no special insight but I think this is a really cool idea. What I do know is if they don't put up a BEP then it won't go anywhere.

[J_Darnley]

> Do you expect all software to start out complete?

No. I would expect a new torrent client to start with tracker announces and then peer communication.

[wmf]

WebTorrent isn't trying to embrace and extend BitTorrent. It is impossible for code running in a browser to speak any of the existing BitTorrent protocols, so as a last resort they are running over WebRTC.