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.
