New opportunities for D => ASM.js

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/15/2014 4:22 AM, "Ola Fosheim Grøstad" 
<ola.fosheim.grostad+dlang at gmail.com>" wrote:
> On Thursday, 15 May 2014 at 05:28:56 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> While Unity3D provides a great boost in cross-platform...ability,
>> they've recently made it very clear they have absolutely no intention
>> of ever supporting any Chrome-only technology. (And on top of that,
>> even their
>
> http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/nacl-gettingstarted.html
>
>> there. So, unfortunately, deadalnix is basically right: These things
>> are pretty much worthless for right now, until everything bakes a bit
>> more.
>
> How much are you willing to bet? :-)
>
> You need a modern PC/mac, but gamers tend to be on that frontier...
>

I hadn't seen that before, however it doesn't really change much. First 
of all, notice that page is pretty old. The last update was over a year 
ago, there's no mention of it working at all on anything beyond Unity 
3.5 (Current Unity3D is at 4.3, and they're already gearing up for 5.0). 
And even at that, the page makes it clear it's last known status is 
basically just a beta feature.

Additionally, Chrome's dropping of NPAPI appears to be central to the 
issue (my understanding is that NaCL requires using either NPAPI or 
PPAPI). And apparently Unity has no intention of porting to PPAPI. See 
the comments here from April 30 of this year (just a couple weeks ago):

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/04/29/on-the-future-of-web-publishing-in-unity/

In response to this user comment:
"What about the issue with chrome dropping support for the web player?
...
You still can use PPAPI to build a unity web player, instead of NPAPI, 
as you have NaCl support already."

Unity's Jonas Echterhoff's reply:
"@De-Panther: We will no port our plugin to PPAPI (it would not be 
compatible with any existing content anyways, due to shader 
differences), because we don’t believe in doing a plugin which will work 
in a single browser only (What you wrote about WebGL, only for PPAPI it 
is actually the case, as there is only one browser which supports it, 
while all browsers are adding WebGL support these days)."

Also, responding to this: "But what about old unity webplayers and games?"

Unity's Jonas Echterhoff's reply:
"@FRANKS GAMES: if browsers drop support for plugins, there is no way, 
we can make that content still work without republishing to WebGL, correct."

I'm not sure whether Unity's NaCL depends on NPAPI or if it's something 
completely separate from the regular "Unity Web Player". But either way, 
it's very clear that NaCL in Unity is either going to be phased out (in 
favor of asm.js/WebGL) or already abandoned.