9 ms·

We've already moved past ARM and x86: there's a bunch of MIPS Android tablets and phones on the market (just not in the West), and MIPS is extremely popular in

We've already moved past ARM and x86: there's a bunch of MIPS Android tablets and phones on the market (just not in the West), and MIPS is extremely popular in home appliances (e.g. most LCD TVs). But this is besides the point. The real question is what the web will look like even 10 years from now, with a large installed base of arch-specific binaries everywhere. I don't want to have to explain to my kids why their browser requires the equivalent of a PDP11 emulator installed to watch certain classic movies and games.

pifflesnort 14y ago
We haven't moved past ARM and x86. Those two cover almost the entire mobile/tablet/desktop market. If there's a real MIPS resurgence outside of WiFi routers (eg, extremely cheap/low-quality tablets), then they can use PNaCL just fine until a native NaCL target is implemented. However, given the market weight behind ARM and x86, this seems extraordinarily unlikely to be used outside of some extreme edge players. IIRC, MIPS support isn't even mainlined into Android.
- hosay123 14y ago
  Right, so by 2040 we can't distribute an application without rebuilding it for 5 or 6 different architectures, one of which is a bitcode format that doesn't even run at native speeds, despite the name. I really love where this is going. [Edit] You're basically demonstrating the entire problem with the Native Client camp - you're so myopically focused on the immediate needs and the immediate environment (arm! x86! games! performance this year!) that you have absolutely no appreciation for the trail of destruction being left for future generations. You have Pepper which is a huge bastardized, specialized clone of all WebGL/HTML 5 audio/media APIs, you have a totally separate offline manifest format that doesn't work like a regular web app, then you have 20 varieties of dumb formats pushed by a single company to advance its private for-profit agenda, when we already had all the vendor-neutral components openly specified, in place and deployed, that just needed some incremental improvement.
  - pifflesnort 14y ago
    > Right, so by 2040 we can't distribute an application without rebuilding it for 5 or 6 different architectures 5 or 6? 2040? All we've seen over the past 20 years is the gradual reduction of in-use architectures down to a few winning players. We're even seeing it in the SoC/MCU space now, where custom architectures are being replaced with ARM. I expect to continue to see evolution and simplification, not revolution. If there is a revolution, well, we'll want to take advantage of the power of that fancy new hardware, I suppose. > one of which is a bitcode format that doesn't even run at native speeds, despite the name. PNaCL generates native code from the bitcode. [response to your edit] > You're basically demonstrating the entire problem with the Native Client camp - you're so myopically focused on the immediate needs and the immediate environment (arm! x86! games! performance this year!) that you have absolutely no appreciation for the trail of destruction being left for future generations. I would say that you're demonstrating why the web camp continues to fail so horribly to move past simple applications: you're so myopically focused on the ideology of tomorrow over providing a great user experience today. In fact, I day say you're leaving a far worse trail of destruction, because web applications are the ultimate expression of always-on DRM. When the servers for your "apps" disappear in a few years time, the applications will disappear right along with them -- forever. How is the Internet Archive going to archive your webapp? > You have Pepper which is a huge bastardized, specialized clone of all WebGL/HTML 5 audio/media APIs That's an overstatement of Pepper. It's quite simple -- far more so than the massive browser stack that WebGL+HTML5 brings with it. In fact, Pepper is simple and constrained enough that someone other than an existing browser vendor or major corporation could actually implement and support a standalone implementation of it. By contrast, producing a compatible browser is such an enormous undertaking that even companies like Opera are giving up and tracking WebKit.
    - bzbarsky 14y ago
      Last I checked, Pepper was full of underdefined stuff that depended on details of Chrome internals. So no, it's not "simple and constrained" enough that you can implement it without reverse-engineering said internals....
      - 14y ago
- mtgx 14y ago
  I think there will be - maybe not at the ARM popularity level, or even x86's level, but it's been acquired by Imagination and I'm sure they have pretty big plans for it.

pifflesnort 14y ago

We haven't moved past ARM and x86. Those two cover almost the entire mobile/tablet/desktop market. If there's a real MIPS resurgence outside of WiFi routers (eg, extremely cheap/low-quality tablets), then they can use PNaCL just fine until a native NaCL target is implemented. However, given the market weight behind ARM and x86, this seems extraordinarily unlikely to be used outside of some extreme edge players. IIRC, MIPS support isn't even mainlined into Android.

hosay123 14y ago
Right, so by 2040 we can't distribute an application without rebuilding it for 5 or 6 different architectures, one of which is a bitcode format that doesn't even run at native speeds, despite the name. I really love where this is going. [Edit] You're basically demonstrating the entire problem with the Native Client camp - you're so myopically focused on the immediate needs and the immediate environment (arm! x86! games! performance this year!) that you have absolutely no appreciation for the trail of destruction being left for future generations. You have Pepper which is a huge bastardized, specialized clone of all WebGL/HTML 5 audio/media APIs, you have a totally separate offline manifest format that doesn't work like a regular web app, then you have 20 varieties of dumb formats pushed by a single company to advance its private for-profit agenda, when we already had all the vendor-neutral components openly specified, in place and deployed, that just needed some incremental improvement.
- pifflesnort 14y ago
  > Right, so by 2040 we can't distribute an application without rebuilding it for 5 or 6 different architectures 5 or 6? 2040? All we've seen over the past 20 years is the gradual reduction of in-use architectures down to a few winning players. We're even seeing it in the SoC/MCU space now, where custom architectures are being replaced with ARM. I expect to continue to see evolution and simplification, not revolution. If there is a revolution, well, we'll want to take advantage of the power of that fancy new hardware, I suppose. > one of which is a bitcode format that doesn't even run at native speeds, despite the name. PNaCL generates native code from the bitcode. [response to your edit] > You're basically demonstrating the entire problem with the Native Client camp - you're so myopically focused on the immediate needs and the immediate environment (arm! x86! games! performance this year!) that you have absolutely no appreciation for the trail of destruction being left for future generations. I would say that you're demonstrating why the web camp continues to fail so horribly to move past simple applications: you're so myopically focused on the ideology of tomorrow over providing a great user experience today. In fact, I day say you're leaving a far worse trail of destruction, because web applications are the ultimate expression of always-on DRM. When the servers for your "apps" disappear in a few years time, the applications will disappear right along with them -- forever. How is the Internet Archive going to archive your webapp? > You have Pepper which is a huge bastardized, specialized clone of all WebGL/HTML 5 audio/media APIs That's an overstatement of Pepper. It's quite simple -- far more so than the massive browser stack that WebGL+HTML5 brings with it. In fact, Pepper is simple and constrained enough that someone other than an existing browser vendor or major corporation could actually implement and support a standalone implementation of it. By contrast, producing a compatible browser is such an enormous undertaking that even companies like Opera are giving up and tracking WebKit.
  - bzbarsky 14y ago
    Last I checked, Pepper was full of underdefined stuff that depended on details of Chrome internals. So no, it's not "simple and constrained" enough that you can implement it without reverse-engineering said internals....
    - 14y ago
mtgx 14y ago
I think there will be - maybe not at the ARM popularity level, or even x86's level, but it's been acquired by Imagination and I'm sure they have pretty big plans for it.