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Comment by daeken | Hacker News Reader

> To get out of the sandbox and wreak havoc?

NaCl, on the whole, is sound. There have only been a few attacks against it, and those were largely during the "come own us" phase. I'm sure there will be further attacks against it, but that is the last issue in play here. Cross-platform and existing standards compatibility are by far the more important ones, not to mention the benefits of code you can optimize as you see fit (Javascript, Flash, and other high-level languages).

Worrying about sandbox escapes from NaCl is silly when you consider the insane attack surface that existing browsers expose to the JS engine.

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I don't worry about NaCI itself, I worry about someone who's too stupid to implement it correctly. And those people are everywhere, especially in big companies. i.e. Nintendo, broken (self built!) RSA in the Wii or even better Sony, using the same "random" number for all their crypto on the PS3... yes FX and Chrome are Open Source, but MS and Opera are not.

Anyways, I'd rather spent a lot of time improving the JITs instead of writing "optimized" low level code myself these days.

You have two choices: use Google's implementation, which is open source and licensed such that it can be used effectively anywhere, or implement it yourself. Implementing it yourself, as long as you follow the NaCl "spec" (a term I use very loosely here) is pretty simple, although it isn't without pitfalls; you should use the existing implementation unless there's a good reason to do otherwise, though.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of the everything-managed approach (hell, I started a pure-managed OS project for a reason), but I don't think that's a reason to avoid NaCl.

Most standards bodies require at least two independent implementations of a specification before labelling it a standard.

Apparently ISO is not one of them, OOXML required zero implementations

I'm sure there will be further attacks against it, but that is the last issue in play here.

I'm sure this attitude will survive for many years to come, although it really shouldn't.

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