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Comment by pifflesnort | Hacker News Reader

> ... 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?

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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.

"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

>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. :)

> 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.

  > 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.

> 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'.

For future Google browsers, maybe.

> attempting to browse the modern web with a 90s browser is futile

And it's hard to imagine stronger evidence that the people designing the "modern web" are not the few who are willing and able to do a competent job of it.

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.

"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.

>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?

zero installation.

I wonder what effect it would have on people's ability to pirate it

People's ability to pirate games is already broken- the more of a game's essential logic gets moved onto a server, the more useless the blob of code you hand over to clients is.

On the other hand, that also destroys a game's ability to be archived, creating a cultural "dark ages" if the approach picks up adoption. "Piracy" is essential to future historians.

With things like Valve and the Mac App Store, installation is a non problem.

I have less issues downloading and updating an app like that, than keening with the subpar experience that is web games, browser compatibility et al.

Not to mention that with the speed of todays networks, even manual installation is a non problem.

We can even put a nice facade on top of it: "just visit this page and click "Install" and you get an app running locally after some small download time. It will even be sandboxed and all-in-one, so it won't mess any part of your system".

"just visit this page and click "Install"" That's one (and possible more) step than is necessary.

As if that matters one iota.

For one, it's merely one of around 20 steps you have to take in either case anyway (steps like: type url, press enter to goto page, wait for page to load, click through some license staff, click to start to play, click for fullscreen if you want, wait for assets and loading, click game settings, suffer through the intro, read help for the game controls, etc). So, yes, you might get rid of one measly step -- all the while introducing other steps, lags and inefficiencies.

Second, this step buys you freedom from having the program run on somebody else's mercy. Of course for networked games and apps with central servers you cannot avoid it.

But I would sure as hell like to avoid it for any program that doesn't need a central server. I don't want to use "Photoshop in the browser" and loose all my stuff when Adobe decides to lock me out or kill the service a la Google Reader. Plus have it be susceptible to internet outages, slowdowns, and using technologies and speeds that's 2-3 generations behind a native app. Not all programs gain from running on the browser. A lot of them lose.

That's a lot of strawmen you've set up there. Want a lighter? We can burn them down together.

Yes the scenarios you describe are ridiculous and unacceptable. But thankfully we live in the real world where those extra steps you describe don't actually exist in apps that were programmed by actually good programmers.

As for whether it matters one iota: It matters if you want more people to play your game. You are a progammer, and so you don't perceive the actual difficulty level of software installation. On the other hand, for normal people with average skill levels, having to install software can present a significant barrier to entry.

>Yes the scenarios you describe are ridiculous and unacceptable. But thankfully we live in the real world where those extra steps you describe don't actually exist in apps that were programmed by actually good programmers.

I have not seen even ONE (ONE) online app or game, where most of the above steps do not exist. You might be able to find one. I doubt you'll find two, much less five.

So, straw-men? Puh-lease.

>It matters if you want more people to play your game. You are a progammer, and so you don't perceive the actual difficulty level of software installation.

For one, you sidestepped all my arguments. I proposed systems like the Mac App Store and Valve -- and even more automated solution, like the Java Web Start for the 21st century (click a button on a webpage, and it's installed and running locally).

And yet, you tell me that "for normal people with average skill levels, having to install software can present a significant barrier to entry", as if we were discussing manual installers and stuff.

You are responding not to what I said, but to the preconceived ideas you have about traditional installers. The stuff I discussed (MAS, etc) are not at all "a significant barrier to entry".

Heck, 5 year olds to 70 year olds can use them just fine on their Mac or their iPhone. I've seen that.

NaCL is gated on PNaCL. NaCL can provide optimal performance, PNaCL can provide portability.

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