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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

I think it makes more sense for them to aim towards some sort of unified platform. NaCL is cool and all, but it's very Google specific. WebGL is now even supported in the latest versions of IE.

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Yeah. Target asm.js and WebGL and you'll get Internet Explorer 11, Chrome, Firefox, IE and probably eventually Safari. With NaCl you get Chrome only. The choice is simple.

The choice wasn't so simple when asm.js was only supported by Firefox, and Microsoft had no plans to support WebGL in IE. :)

asm.js is supported, inherently, by all modern browsers. It is just JavaScript, after all. However, only Firefox has a second compiler path especially for it. Chrome has some optimisations for asm.js-like code in V8.

Well, yes, but I find the WebGL port of the Unreal Engine demo (for example) unplayable without asm.js-specific optimizations. So by "supported" I really mean "optimized".

a subset of a language is not the language itself. asm.js is not javascript.

As a company they surely do not care if something is Google specific or not. They only care if they can sell enough licenses for it to make the development costs make sense. In light of chrome's adoption curve it seems to be a not terrible idea to target nacl.

Or they could just target WebGL and asm.js, which already works in Chrome, and let's see how long Google sits around with Chrome being slower at a popular use case.

Exactly, and it was also driven by the fact that it was easy for the Unity guys to get their existing toolchain building on NaCls LLVM toolchain. Now with ASM.js maturing, its another great opportunity.

Also we saw Unity developed a target for the Flash runtime (now with Flash pretty much dead, thats being shelved). Gotta give props to Unity for trying.

Wait a sec, are they saying the Unity5 webgl exporter will only work in firefox?

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