[BrendanEich]

I always reply when I have something worth saying.

"Hate" is the wrong word. There's nothing to hate in a well-done SFI-enforcing compiler. I admire the R&D effort. We -- bad old Mozilla, including evil-me -- are seriously considering using NaCl (not Pepper) for SFI in native code parts of Servo. No "hate" here, so do try to grow up: "You hate NaCl" is just weak, beneath you, as an analysis of motives and causes.

Let's step away from NaCl as pure tech for safer compilation of unsafe languages.

I do call Google's business strategy pushing NaCl+Pepper via games and even (till it all fell apart last November) Flash heavy-handed, and one-sided to such an extent that what's pushed can never be standardized.

What's belligerent here is for someone (haberman), who I hear works for Google, a company that has all the money and power in the world, and which makes actual "pro-NaCl propaganda" as well as pays game developers and others to use the Chrome-only tech (NaCl, not PNaCl, note well), to fire first on this thread. It wasn't me who showed "belligerence".

That first shot even tried open-washing, lamely, and it tellingly put Mozilla in the subordinate position. ''I could understand "we want to be more involved in the process."''

If you don't work for Google or hold a brief for them, ask yourself why haberman's presumption is that Mozilla, or any other browser maker, should be asking or begging to be included in a process that we were excluded from and practically speaking could never participate in without equal big bucks and market power.

The great thing about the Web is that no one owns it. Browser vendors, tool makers, and developers (whom the first two groups avidly court) have to reach consensus via standards. And I find that developers, not just pure web devs, definitely including @kripken (Emscripten's creator), @jashkenas (CoffeeScript), and others, are more creative and faster moving than many highly-paid C++-first hackers, including those perpetrating single-vendor follies such as NaCl+Pepper.

Whine at me, cry "hate" and "belligerence" while turning a blind eye to the big gun who fired first, and shoot the messenger. It doesn't matter. NaCl+Pepper have already lost to JS for portable cross-browser high-performance native code compilation.

[gunsmith]

That's why you have been supporting Emscripten with... just one developer, it's creator? Shouldn't there be a whole team towards this goal you envision?

Currently emscripten should have the amount of people three.js has.

[BrendanEich]

There is a team working on the longer-term goal, including game platform, JS engine, and Mozilla Research people. Why did you assume otherwise?

Also, Emscripten has a strong github community. Unlike Google we can't afford to pay everyone who might be needed -- we also prefer not to if we can build a wider community from day one.

[askimto]

Ah I see I should have said "Google" where I said "NaCl". My mistake.

[BrendanEich]

You're doing better! But no, I don't "hate" Google. Big companies and big groups of people in general have inherent morally failure-prone properties. Google fights these, and in many ways still manages "don't be evil".

Heavy-handed and one-sided strategies and tactics may be odious, I may "hate" them -- you should too if they're not well-justified and likely to prevail -- but that's not the point of this exchange, which haberman started. Nice try deflecting, though.

The point of my slide, and of my comments here, is to make the case for what's best for the Web. So let's get back to that.

What is best for the Web? Not NaCl, we all agree. PNaCl? Not with Pepper as a mandatory API for all browsers to adopt. And PNaCl has a JS back end.

Steve Jobs killed Flash. Plugins are in decline. However well Google, Mozilla, and others use NaCl for native code safety, on the Web JS looks highly likely to continue, and to get super-fast for the well-typed and GC-free code produced by Emscripten.

This all points to a future where evolved JS is the PNaCl format that works cross-browser. We're already working on this at Mozilla, but via Emscripten not PNaCl. If Google aims its formidable engineers at the same goal and works in the standards bodies early and fairly, great. I'd love that.

[gunsmith]

Do you think the current status of Emscripten justifies your words? We'd all like to believe that.

[BrendanEich]

The challenge now is more on the JS VM side, optimizing the Emscripten-generated idioms and the typed array memory model. Also, longer-term, we're working on JS language evolution via Ecma TC39.

These are focus areas of the team I just mentioned.

[gunsmith]

Well we agree. My answer is not to justify PNaCL, but to let you know that when you say "we commit to this", it means we give some serious investment on Emscripten and building a community. So far Emscripten has only been mentioned as 1-2 slides on each JS talk. And I think we both agree that a serious project as it is, it needs a few people building posting updates and letting everyone about the great work that is being done by @kripken.

Thanks though for your answer.