Hacker News Reader

Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

I believe it's open, and not patented (or I'm wrong?), an attempt to bring LLVM IR (quite standardized) to browser side. It's redundant (competes with asm.js, which is the same kind of "non-standard nonsense" with a WIP spec) with it's own pros and cons, but that's about it.

Every browser vendor experiments with new ideas, only because of this we're getting nice things as the results.

View on HN

I have no axe to grind against LLVM or PNaCl, but I think you may have a novel definition of "quite standardized".

It's easy to say that when you're not providing any examples yourself at where pnacl's standardization efforts is lacking, and where asm.js is doing a good job at it...

I'm using the standard definition, of course.

Seriously, the absence of a published standard from a credible and relevant standards body would be my primary objection to the phrase. Barring that, de facto standardization would be indicated by multiple interoperable implementations from more than one vendor and widespread adoption. LLVM IR and PNaCl are, at best, documented. That's better than undocumented, but it's a long way from standardized.

I never said asm.js is standardized. ECMA/JavaScript is, though, and asm.js is just a well-defined conventional subset of JS. There doesn't need to be a standard.

If we take the definition of "standardized" as "there exist one or more cross-vendor (draft) standards that, when correctly implemented in a user agent, allow asm.js to run properly" then asm.js is standardized.

You're right. It's widespread, but I was certainly wrong with "standardized" part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com