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0 pointsbzbarsky14y ago0 comments

Yes. Which means it does NOT run on PPC, or MIPS, or IA-32, or Sparc. Note that there are modern-ish web browsers available for at least PPC, MIPS, and Sparc.

More importantly, content using NaCl would not run on any new hardware platforms that might appear.

So if the web were to use NaCl to an appreciable extent, new platforms would be unable to get any traction in any context that relied on the web. We'd be stuck with ARM or X86 forever for any mobile devices we might have.

Maybe you think that's ok; I think that's a terrible idea; an attitude like that toward the web in the late 1990s would have meant that ARM phones that appeared in the late 2000s would not have been able to browse the web!

(Also, note that I said "hardware _platforms_", not what you asked above.)

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jlouis14y ago

PPC, MIPS, and Sparc are dead platforms anyway. X86 and ARM is where its currently at, like it or not. So it does make sense to target these platforms first. I don't buy that this is a step backwards. Rather, it is a step in the right direction: So we can run other languages in the browsers, at full speed - untangling the web from Javascript. It is about time.

bzbarskyOP14y ago

> PPC, MIPS, and Sparc are dead platforms anyway

You say that because you're not the one actually using hardware built on those chips. And presumably you don't care whether people who _are_ can use the web. But some other people do care.

> X86 and ARM is where its currently at

Key word being "currently". That's fine, but we don't want to make the web _require_ this.

> So it does make sense to target these platforms first.

Sure, but with NaCl you _can't_ target other ones later. You'd have to recompile the code server-side to add any other platforms. This isn't the case with JavaScript, say, where all a new platform would have to do is write a jit for itself and existing content would just work.

PNaCl, if they ever get it working, might not have this particular problem, by the way. If that ever gets off the ground, I'd be happy to revisit this discussion.

> So we can run other languages in the browsers, at full > speed

And forever lock all computing in the world into the ARM and x86 architectures. No thanks.

Or are you talking about software that you only want to run this month and will never want to run again?

wwweston14y ago

"I don't buy that this is a step backwards."

Moving from a hardware independent web to one where a full experience would be limited to a few "where its currently at" hardware platforms isn't a step backwards? Heck, while you're at it, why don't we just specify an iOS, Android, and Windows web only?

You're also, by the way, talking about the decline if not the death of a view-source web, a semantic web, and a hypermedia focused web, and probably some other things I'm missing.

By all means, feel free to write native client-server apps for any reason that pleases you, whether it's that you don't like JavaScript as a language or are working on something that truly demands native speed. Just don't advocate destroying the features that have made the web successful.

azakai14y ago

> 86 and ARM is where its currently at, like it or not.

The important word is currently. As the GP said, 10 years ago "archs where its currently at" would not include ARM, and the ARM success on phones and tablets would have been impossible, because they wouldn't have been able to run the web, if the web used Native Client!

10 years from now, we could have entirely new architectures, and if we lock the web into the currently popular ones, we might miss out on those.

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