4 ms·

I have no idea why Mozilla was so resistant to pnacl. It's a nice step beyond the nasty legacy JavaScript mess. Among other things, JavaScript is necessarily si

• Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
  > I have no idea why Mozilla was so resistant to pnacl Pepper for one is a pretty good reason IMHO
  • duaneb 14y ago
    Why? It seems like a good replacement for npapi.
    • sirn 14y ago
      Brendan Eich discussed about this few months ago at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4630334 Anyway, he said that the problem with Pepper is that its API is gigantic and its only spec is the implementation in Chromium. Other browsers could port the API but it come at very high cost due to WebKit-specific glue code.
      • pekk 14y ago
        The "problem" with pnacl is that it means the end of Javascript's death grip on the browser, which Brendan Eich is interested in extending for obvious reasons
        • lukeschlather 14y ago
          I think you're overstating it. It more likely means the beginning of Google's death grip on the browser.
          • munificent 14y ago
            How does Google have a death grip on the browser?
            • lukeschlather 14y ago
              They don't yet. I'm saying pnacl is more likely to result in Google getting a death grip on the browser than ending Javascript's dominance.
              • munificent 14y ago
                Oooooh, the ominous "yet". Scary.
    • jgraham 14y ago
      To be clear, there are two things that have historically been called "pepper". The first was a basically a better version of NPAPI, with the limited scope that implies. That was replaced by something that's basically a Google-proprietary replacement for the entire web stack, with both the scope and the problems that implies.
• mtgx 14y ago
  Isn't V8 multi-threaded? You might be right about the other JS engines, though.
  • duaneb 14y ago
    It may run on multiple threads but I don't think it exposes threading to the runtime. Ecmascript is certainly single threaded and async by design, so v8 would be straying far from the spec. I'd love to be proven wrong.
    • Ygg2 14y ago
      Wait, what are Web-workers then?
      • cwmma 14y ago
        for opening up a new separate thread, that you can only communicate through message passing. It's not part of the core language but the browser library hence why you can't use them in Node.
        • rictic 14y ago
          They're also more directly comparable to processes than threads, as they do not share memory (though there are a couple of proposals to allow them to).
          • duaneb 14y ago
            Apparently ParallelArray allows shared memory.
            • cwmma 14y ago
              yeah but that's not approved yet and from what I can tell ParallelArray is higher level then Workers and doesn't really expose that sort of thing.
• Ygg2 14y ago
  DRY? I think NaCl will require Mozilla to implement another VM or parser, and do same optimization it already does on JS. So why should they repeat themselves?
  • duaneb 14y ago
    Because designing web standards around laziness is not a great idea and leads to things like.... JavaScript.
• espadrine 14y ago
  > Among other things, JavaScript is necessarily single threaded... That isn't quite true anymore either, because of Web Workers and ParallelArray. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=801869&hide_resolved=1 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=80186... https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail/wiki/ParallelArray https://github.com/RiverTrail/RiverTrail/wiki/ParallelArray
  • niggler 14y ago
    "That isn't quite true anymore either, because of Web Workers and ParallelArray." Quote from yesterday's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5451658 "WebWorkers are not really a multithread model. Game engines could be written to leverage message passing based isolates, but in some cases, but doing it in an optimal form isn't exactly developer friendly, it's one of pains of developing the PS3 SPEs is that they didn't share system memory and you had to DMA stuff around."
    • pcwalton 14y ago
      ParallelArray allows data to be shared without copies.
  • duaneb 14y ago
    Isn't that browsers only? And not really suited (or horribly suited) for realtime work like video games.
    • audreyt 14y ago
      WebWorker with native threads is available on Node.js: https://github.com/audreyt/node-webworker-threads https://github.com/audreyt/node-webworker-threads For an alternate model of parallel computing, WebCL (OpenCL) has been ported to Node.js as well: https://github.com/fifield/node-webcl https://github.com/fifield/node-webcl