[BrendanEich]

The slide I showed is not misleading. NaCl is not portable, PNaCl is still not ready for prime time based on Google's own actions, and you protest too much and do not practice what you preach.

"Mozilla" meaning me, bzbarsky, blizzard (previously), roc on the plugin-futures list, others have been forthright compared to the mostly-silent other browser vendors, who haven't even spoken via corporate or individual channels on this non-issue apart from my pal Maciej at Apple coining "Active G" to refer to Pepper.

If this circumstance makes you shoot us, the messengers, you need to read more Greek tragedy!

We're telling you why NaCl/Pepper are a no-sale among all the non-chromium browsers. You don't like the reasons we give, but that's no justification for your ascribing to us bad motives or a dishonest agenda or techniques ("propaganda"). We have been perfectly clear about the unacceptably high cost of Pepper, and the single-company control problem of all of NaCl/PNaCl/Pepper.

Your own misstatements are yours, and you should retract or not based on their righteous or wrongful nature, not on what anyone else does. That you excuse your conduct based on your grievance with us is thoroughly broken, as a piece of moral reasoning.

At this point you are perfectly clear: you want a free lunch (from all browsers, but especially from Firefox), we won't give it to you, so you call us names and imply that we act out of bad motives. That makes you persona non grata in my book. Good luck!

[haberman]

> At this point you are perfectly clear: you want a free lunch

Nope, I wanted a footnote that says "they're working on it." That is about 97% of what I wanted from this discussion. ES6 isn't "ready for prime time" either, being an unfinished spec, and yet the entire presentation was about that. You're comparing JavaScript's future with NaCl's present, and not mentioning that it is Google's stated purpose to remove the glaring limitation that is the basis of your discounting it as a technology (at least as far as that slide is concerned). How is that not misleading?

I have never once suggested, in a single one of my messages on this thread, that non-Chromium browsers should adopt NaCl/Pepper in their current form (in fact I have said exactly the opposite, that I can understand their reasons for not wanting to), and yet you continue to attribute this viewpoint to me, calling me "astoundingly naive" for it, and issuing no retraction for that (despite all the retractions you demand from me). How is this the moral high ground?

I would be happy (more than happy, actually) to completely retract my statement, since it certainly gives me no pleasure to think that you would mislead your audience, but you are declining to demonstrate that I was wrong or that you have an interest in being entirely forthcoming with your audience. By pressuring me to retract my statements while feeling free to say what you want I feel you are bullying me. I'm not a huge fan of how you are ascribing inaccurate viewpoints to me and calling me names for them, and yet I am not demanding that you retract it all or I will discount your existence as a person (incredibly harsh, by the way).

[othermaciej]

I've expressed my personal opinions about NaCl here on HN before too: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2057611

[haberman]

For what it's worth, I think the comment you linked is far more fair and balanced criticism. If all of the statements I was hearing from Mozilla people sounded like that, I would have no beef.

[othermaciej]

I have a different writing style from Brendan, but I don't think there is any significant substantive difference between what he said in this thread and what I said almost 2 years ago.

(Although, the fact that PNaCl is still an experiment and not the mainstream of NaCl nearly two years after I wrote my comment should be further cause for concern.)

[haberman]

The significant substantive differences, to me as a reader, are:

- You don't make final-sounding judgments like "never" or "non-starter" that preemptively reject any future evolution of the technology.

- Your criticisms are highly pragmatic and specific, such that it is clear what hurdles the technology would have to clear to address them, and you don't close the door to the idea that they could (even if it seems unlikely to you).

- You don't fall back on ideological arguments like native code as a "social ill" that would suggest that your true objections run deeper than what any technical improvements could possibly address.

Thank you for that.

[othermaciej]

Wow, I didn't notice that the thread continued for so long after I posted.

The things you cite are pretty much all because I would never give 0% probability to a future event. Who knows? Things change. But I think it is quite unlikely that NaCl will become a widely accepted part of the Web platform, and I think that would be a bad thing in its current state.

My "highly pragmatic and specific" criticisms seem to me like they say the same thing as Brendan's original slide bullets, just with more detail. I did not mention "no view source", but I agree that is a significant downside, if not necessarily as much of a showstopper as the others. Being a single-vendor-controlled technology is the biggest showstopper.

Another big issue that I didn't mention, and which I think also aligns with Brendan's criticisms, is that adding a major new technology to the web platform requires tremendously compelling use cases and a good argument that they cannot be handled with existing technologies. I don't think that case has really been made for NaCl.

And yes, I did jokingly coin the term "ActiveG" to refer to NaCl. Though I believe it was another wag who later referred to Dart as "GBScript".

[haberman]

Oh hey, I just saw this now.

For what it's worth I thought you were from Mozilla when I wrote my post, not that it matters that much either way.

I think you made some substantial points that were not covered in Brendan's slides, specifically:

- A standard with only one implementation is de facto controlled by one entity. This is a great point, and different than Brendan's point "defined by implementation." Brendan's criticism would be solved simply by standardizing (P)NaCl under multi-party governance, which I fully expect Google will do at some point. [0] Your criticism is not solved unless it is actually practically feasible for someone else to implement that standard.

- Relying on binary-level validation of binary code has a lot of attack surface. This is a great point that I've seen others make, though I believe it is being addressed (perhaps since you wrote your message) by having multiple layers of defense (ie. also running in a separate process inside a ptrace sandbox).

It doesn't bother me that you joke around with your friends by calling it "ActiveG," because in the context of serious discussion you acknowledge that it has "a better attempt at security design than ActiveX." It does bother me when others seriously compare the two, as if a completely unsandboxed execution environment can be compared to a serious attempt at sandboxing.

In any case, now that it supposed to be shipping soon (http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57534803-93/google-offers-l...) we should get a better chance to see if it truly can demonstrate a compelling improvement over JavaScript.

[0] Just wanted to mention that though I work for Google I am not involved in (P)NaCl and have no inside information about it.

[BrendanEich]

The purpose of my "final-sounding judgments" is to cut the crap in the short term that keeps getting dumped on Mozilla by you and others with an enlarged sense of entitlement, and an unjustified assumption that NaCl/PNaCl + Pepper is somehow "better" in the large, and so should get free support from non-Chrome browsers.

If you think overcoming some hurdles enumerated by Maciej will get PNaCL and Pepper support into Safari (where, BTW, Pepper is closest to porting cleanly by any measure, e.g., patch size), you're dreaming. Remember, I did not coin the funny "Active G" phrase. That shoe was fit by the guy you're trying to suck up to here.

If an indefinite-future-tense, and therefore worthless, promise from me to be open to portable SuperPNaCl in 2020, will get you to stop bashing Mozilla and flattering Apple, then here it is. Indeed my plan is for JS to evolve and mutate to be that portable object format for native code to compile to.

Emscripten is a promising sign along this path. And the PNaCl folks are targeting JS too, I hear, so this looks like a common goal.

Now can you stop defaming Mozilla?

/be

[askimto]

Now can you start ignoring haberman like you said you would? Your belligerent comments are getting a bit old at this point. You hate NaCl. We get it. Criticizing a slide makes you upset. OK. Understood.

[BrendanEich]

Maciej and I agree, but you are holding Mozilla to a different standard from Apple. Another reason I'm striving to ignore you (for both our sakes).