If PNaCL or similar can't be leveraged, then the web won't keep up as an app platform. Let's look at the modern platforms: - Microsoft is innovating heavily o

If PNaCL or similar can't be leveraged, then the web won't keep up as an app platform. Let's look at the modern platforms: - Microsoft is innovating heavily on the language front with C#, F#, and the CLR. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft's platforms, but there is no denying that they're doing very interesting work in language and runtime design. - Google is innovating with Android, the Dalvik VM, and an application development framework not too much worse than Apple's. You have the NDK at your disposal, and many GL-based games can be ported without too much complexity from iOS. Numerous languages are being ported to the JVM, and are supported on Android. - Apple is innovating with UIKit and high-level high-quality application development frameworks. Even if ObjC isn't particularly cutting edge, it's a reasonable solution for building large applications, it's fast enough, and you've got C at hand. The browser makers, however, are fighting over whether or not WebSockets can actually be included in the browser; meanwhile, Apple rolled out GameKit support for automatic peer-to-peer session negotiation over bluetooth, wifi, and the internet to support multiplayer games. The web as an application platform is broken, and will continue to be so as long as browser makers attempt to force everyone to stick to one language, lacking a standardized platform API, using a poor view model (DOM/HTML/CSS), stuck in the browser's limited sandbox.