37 ms·

> ... there's sufficiently plausible technical and political resistance that we're probably never going to. Resistance that you contribute to with almost every

> ... there's sufficiently plausible technical and political resistance that we're probably never going to. Resistance that you contribute to with almost every article that touches on NaCL, yes. It's self-fulfilling prophesy and a circular argument: "We can't adopt NaCL because nobody will ever adopt NaCL" -- say the people responsible for choosing whether to adopt NaCL. > So why abandon our current path for something that'll inevitably end up as ugly as JS in the long term, when we already have something as ugly as JS. Why is this the "inevitable" result?

hosay123 14y ago
Show me a counterexample, that's all I ask. I'd give all the rhetoric in the world for a single damned counterexample of a program format that's lasted since the 80s. That's what's at stake. Instead we have a company that throws specs over the wall like they're teenaged nerds that have just discovered Pascal's pack function, a company that pushed SPDY on everyone despite it relying on a draft SSL feature that got rejected at the IETF (and in the space of 2/3 years we now have three HTTP variants - and why? Because 3 years ago it shaved 1ms off a maps.google.com request). Did you even take a look at the original WebSocket spec? It worked in terms of comparing the entire start of the HTTP request using memcmp()! Regardless of my opinion of NaCl, this is stuff that should be getting defined slowly and in the open by bearded old men that have spent their lives in glacial, trusted industries like telecoms, or just about any other mature technology industry. Not a throng of Java graduates who think they're changing the world by continually dumping crap specs over the wall and paying for subsidized articles to promote them.
- niggler 14y ago
  "a throng of Java graduates who think they're changing the world by continually dumping crap specs over the wall and paying for subsidized articles to promote them." Based on the media hype surrounding asm.js, it really sounds like mozilla fits the description
  - shardling 14y ago
    >Based on the media hype surrounding asm.js, it really sounds like mozilla fits the description Wait, what? I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. If you seriously think Mozilla has payed for articles about themselves, you've gone off the deep end. I know that I personally became aware of asm.js because of an offhand comment Eich made on HN. I posted that link on both reddit and HN, which I guess was the start of the hype, so if you could let me know where to collect my Mozilla money I'd be obliged. :)
- pifflesnort 14y ago
  > Show me a counterexample, that's all I ask. I'd give all the rhetoric in the world for a single damned counterexample of a program format that's lasted since the 80s. That's what's at stake. ELF was defined in the late 80s/early 90s as part of SVR4. COFF was defined as part of SVR3. Both still exist today. The JVM bytecode was defined in 1995 and has been evolved compatibly. I'm curious, though. Do you require the same longevity of web formats that were defined in the 90s? Things have changed quite a bit, and attempting to browse the modern web with a 90s browser is futile. Given that, I don't really understand what you're arguing for. > Regardless of my opinion of NaCl, this is stuff that should be getting defined slowly and in the open by bearded old men that have spent their lives in glacial, trusted industries like telecoms, or just about any other mature technology industry. Us 'bearded old men' aren't on the web, and its only improvements like SPDY, WebSockets, and NaCL that have made me the slightest bit interested in the web as an application platform.
  - pyre 14y ago
    > attempting to browse the modern web with a > 90s browser is futile I think the inverse is what we're talking about. Will we be able to browse NaCl sites in future browsers (possibly after an architecture change away from x86)? As it stands, we would probably be able to browse a 90's site on modern browsers. It sounds like if NaCl compiles things down to ASM x86 (or really AMD64) (?). If that's true, then it's possible for things to not be forward compatible. I'll admit that it doesn't seem likely, especially after what happened with Itanium and AMD64/x86-64, but we could see things move towards ARM.
    - pifflesnort 14y ago
      > I think the inverse is what we're talking about. Will we be able to browse NaCl sites in future browsers (possibly after an architecture change away from x86)? As it stands, we would probably be able to browse a 90's site on modern browsers. Given PNaCL, the answer should be 'yes'.
      - mbetter 14y ago
        For future Google browsers, maybe.
nitrogen 14y ago
The actual arguments against NaCl have been reiterated many times, and go well beyond the circular reasoning you suggest is being displayed. Unless you want to argue for the fun of arguing, the polite thing to do is to consider the previous arguments as implicitly included in the current discussion, and interpret other comments as charitably as possible. For the sake of completeness, I'll note one of the biggest detriments of original NaCl: a lack of platform independence.
- niggler 14y ago
  "a lack of platform independence" Platform independence is not an obvious goal for game developers. If it were, you would see the same game show up in every platform, but that's not what we see. Heck, only recently did we really see games show up for Mac. For high performance contexts, you want to be able to express algorithms in a way that takes full advantage of the hardware, and the lack of homogeneity in hardware demands a platform-dependent solution.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    >Platform independence is not an obvious goal for game developers. The web is not a platform solely for game developers. Run native game code inside a browser why? What exactly do you get over, say, running it natively as a desktop/mobile app and just distributing it over the internet and/or web?
    - TheZenPsycho 14y ago
      zero installation.
      - rhu86 14y ago
        I wonder what effect it would have on people's ability to pirate it
        TheZenPsycho 14y ago

hosay123 14y ago

Show me a counterexample, that's all I ask. I'd give all the rhetoric in the world for a single damned counterexample of a program format that's lasted since the 80s. That's what's at stake. Instead we have a company that throws specs over the wall like they're teenaged nerds that have just discovered Pascal's pack function, a company that pushed SPDY on everyone despite it relying on a draft SSL feature that got rejected at the IETF (and in the space of 2/3 years we now have three HTTP variants - and why? Because 3 years ago it shaved 1ms off a maps.google.com request). Did you even take a look at the original WebSocket spec? It worked in terms of comparing the entire start of the HTTP request using memcmp()! Regardless of my opinion of NaCl, this is stuff that should be getting defined slowly and in the open by bearded old men that have spent their lives in glacial, trusted industries like telecoms, or just about any other mature technology industry. Not a throng of Java graduates who think they're changing the world by continually dumping crap specs over the wall and paying for subsidized articles to promote them.

niggler 14y ago
"a throng of Java graduates who think they're changing the world by continually dumping crap specs over the wall and paying for subsidized articles to promote them." Based on the media hype surrounding asm.js, it really sounds like mozilla fits the description
- shardling 14y ago
  >Based on the media hype surrounding asm.js, it really sounds like mozilla fits the description Wait, what? I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here. If you seriously think Mozilla has payed for articles about themselves, you've gone off the deep end. I know that I personally became aware of asm.js because of an offhand comment Eich made on HN. I posted that link on both reddit and HN, which I guess was the start of the hype, so if you could let me know where to collect my Mozilla money I'd be obliged. :)
pifflesnort 14y ago
> Show me a counterexample, that's all I ask. I'd give all the rhetoric in the world for a single damned counterexample of a program format that's lasted since the 80s. That's what's at stake. ELF was defined in the late 80s/early 90s as part of SVR4. COFF was defined as part of SVR3. Both still exist today. The JVM bytecode was defined in 1995 and has been evolved compatibly. I'm curious, though. Do you require the same longevity of web formats that were defined in the 90s? Things have changed quite a bit, and attempting to browse the modern web with a 90s browser is futile. Given that, I don't really understand what you're arguing for. > Regardless of my opinion of NaCl, this is stuff that should be getting defined slowly and in the open by bearded old men that have spent their lives in glacial, trusted industries like telecoms, or just about any other mature technology industry. Us 'bearded old men' aren't on the web, and its only improvements like SPDY, WebSockets, and NaCL that have made me the slightest bit interested in the web as an application platform.
- pyre 14y ago
  > attempting to browse the modern web with a > 90s browser is futile I think the inverse is what we're talking about. Will we be able to browse NaCl sites in future browsers (possibly after an architecture change away from x86)? As it stands, we would probably be able to browse a 90's site on modern browsers. It sounds like if NaCl compiles things down to ASM x86 (or really AMD64) (?). If that's true, then it's possible for things to not be forward compatible. I'll admit that it doesn't seem likely, especially after what happened with Itanium and AMD64/x86-64, but we could see things move towards ARM.
  - pifflesnort 14y ago
    > I think the inverse is what we're talking about. Will we be able to browse NaCl sites in future browsers (possibly after an architecture change away from x86)? As it stands, we would probably be able to browse a 90's site on modern browsers. Given PNaCL, the answer should be 'yes'.
    - mbetter 14y ago
      For future Google browsers, maybe.

nitrogen 14y ago

The actual arguments against NaCl have been reiterated many times, and go well beyond the circular reasoning you suggest is being displayed. Unless you want to argue for the fun of arguing, the polite thing to do is to consider the previous arguments as implicitly included in the current discussion, and interpret other comments as charitably as possible. For the sake of completeness, I'll note one of the biggest detriments of original NaCl: a lack of platform independence.

niggler 14y ago
"a lack of platform independence" Platform independence is not an obvious goal for game developers. If it were, you would see the same game show up in every platform, but that's not what we see. Heck, only recently did we really see games show up for Mac. For high performance contexts, you want to be able to express algorithms in a way that takes full advantage of the hardware, and the lack of homogeneity in hardware demands a platform-dependent solution.
- coldtea 14y ago
  >Platform independence is not an obvious goal for game developers. The web is not a platform solely for game developers. Run native game code inside a browser why? What exactly do you get over, say, running it natively as a desktop/mobile app and just distributing it over the internet and/or web?
  - TheZenPsycho 14y ago
    zero installation.
    - rhu86 14y ago
      I wonder what effect it would have on people's ability to pirate it
      - TheZenPsycho 14y ago