[azakai]

> Yes, but NaCl provides direct access to GPU interface libraries. You can code for OpenGL directly, rather than running your graphics code through several layers of abstraction, slowing it down exponentially along the way.

If shaders are the bottleneck, and not graphics calls, then NaCl and JS will be the same.

If graphics calls are the bottleneck, then sure, NaCl will be faster - but likely you need to do more batching in your GL code.

> JS has certainly had some significant advances in speed over the last few years, but there's only so much optimization you can do. It's still running in a VM, so there will always be that overhead.

NaCl is essentially also running in a VM: It's sandboxed, so it has performance limitations. There are types of code that run slowly in NaCl, just like in the JVM. However, VM code can be fairly fast in general, the JVM and NaCl are speedy on a lot of code.

The point though is that JS can be fast too - once it has as many years of effort put into it as the JVM and native compilers has, it will be. It's just still very new. "Being in a VM" is not the issue.