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Comment by kentonv

4 days ago

> I feel like it could be a barrier to being taken seriously in some environments.

Working as intended. ;)

3 comments

kentonv

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kentonv  4 days ago

In all seriousness: I develop Cap'n Proto to serve my own projects that use it, such at the Cloudflare Workers runtime. It is actually not my goal to see Cap'n Proto itself adopted widely. I mean, don't get me wrong, it'd be cool, but it isn't really a net benefit to me personally: maybe people will contribute useful features, but mostly they will probably just want me to review their PRs adding features I don't care about, or worse, demand I fix things I don't care about, and that's just unpaid labor for me. So mostly I'm happy with them not.

It's entirely possible that this will change in the future: like maybe we'll decide that Cap'n Proto should be a public-facing part of the Cloudflare Workers platform (rather than just an implementation detail, as it is today), in which case adoption would then benefit Workers and thus me. At the moment, though, that's not the plan.

In any case, if there's some company that fancies themselves Too Serious to use a technology with such a silly name and web site, I am perfectly happy for them to not use it! :)

  • mikepurvis  4 days ago

    Ha, I wondered if you'd comment. Yeah that's a reasonable take.

    I think for me it would be less about locking out stodgy, boring companies, and perhaps instead it being an issue for emerging platforms that are themselves concerned with the optics of being "taken seriously". I'm specifically in the robotics space, and over the past ten years ROS has been basically rewritten to be based around DDS, and I know during the evaluation process for that there were prototypes kicked around that would have been more webtech type stuff, things like 0mq, protobufs, etc. In the end the decision for DDS was made on technical merits, but I still suspect that it being a thing that had preexisting traction in aerospace and especially NASA influenced that.