pNaCl

[bearophile]

The web today is very important for new computer languages. If you can use a language to produce things that can run on a browser, then your language receives a huge boost in popularity.

The good NaCl (Google portable client) gets better:
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/native-client-and-web-portability.html

Works on 64 bit CPUs, its performance on modern 64 bit CPUs is within about 8% of a normal binary, and now they have added the pNaCl protocol, it even allows to distribute code in a portable format, llvm bytecode :-) It main limits are the total memory that you can use that's less than 4 GB and that you can't use the true CPU asm inlined. So it's not bad.

It's probably not hard to let LDC be usable with pNaCl. Suddenly the goal of using D on the web too gets closer. D can be the best language for pNaCl :-) Better than Java, C#, all dynamic languages, and maybe better than C++ and C too. I hope you realize this not a negligible opportunity window for D. Similar opportunities don't appear every day. I will have a chance to talk with some Google people about the idea of using D with pNaCl in less than a month.

Bye,
bearophile