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That would be a reasonable argument if Mozilla wasn't still adding extensions to NPAPI, a far less webby technology that's a much worse design and outright dang
by justinschuh 14y ago
That would be a reasonable argument if Mozilla wasn't still adding extensions to NPAPI, a far less webby technology that's a much worse design and outright dangerous for end-users. And yes, NaCl has its awkwardness, but it's far better than NPAPI, and if you look a bit you'll realize that NaCl's awkwardness is specifically because it can support things that asm.js can't. NaCl has real native threads, clean debugging, and a simpler legacy code path, but the cost is the complexity of the implementation.
The funny thing in all this is that I'm really not a proponent of NaCl. I find it technically very interesting, but I never considered architecture-specific NaCl viable for the Web, and there are still kinks to work out with PNaCl. I just find the attitude towards asm.js curious, because it carries so many of the past criticisms of NaCl (not human readable, initially developed in private, etc.).
- fivealive 14y agoWhy would Mozilla add extensions to NPAPI, for more advanced plugins that must be trusted or expensively sandboxed because they are normally compiled? Mozilla is doing everything in the web, adding sound and graphic APIs to html not duplicating them for legacy native code. It doesn't even make sense for Google to do Pepper, let alone Mozilla. Real threads essentially mean that every call must copy all data or else another thread could modify the data while it is being used by trusted code, or all threads have to be suspended. That's clumsy and not a good solution.
- cromwellian 14y agoReal threads also mean you get to maximize hardware resources. Modern game engines leverage multi-core.
- justinschuh 14y agoYour statements here are just nonsensical. And given that your account was created the day of this post, and hasn't commented on anything else, it's hard not to read this as simple trolling.