NaCl stable ABI

[Peter Alexander]

On 2/08/11 2:24 AM, Adam Ruppe wrote:
>  From what I can tell, it's Google's alternative to Flash; they want
> to make crappy games on it.
>
> Consider that the first thing they ported to it, again, just like
> their javascript nonsense, was Quake. (I think Google loves
> Javascript too much to let it go anyway.)
>
> The API has a lot of graphics and audio stuff too which reinforces
> this.

The games industry has been crying out for something like NaCl for a 
long time. It is exactly what we want:

- Ability to launch games within browser without a plugin download
- Platform independent ABI
- No f*cking Javascript (performance will never match C++)
- Safe (no need for end users to worry)


JavaScript for high-quality games is a non-starter. It's too slow. You 
simply cannot do high performance numeric code in Javascript 
(http://chadaustin.me/2011/01/digging-into-javascript-performance/).

Writing C++ code to run outside of the browser is a pain, and 
inconvenient for the user. First, you have to write your code to handle 
all the different platforms, which is a huge burden. Once you've done 
that, you need to convince users to download and install your game. It 
would be much more convenient to just have users go a website and be 
done with it.

If D were usable in NaCl that would be a huge selling point for the 
language.