Turning Mesa Into JavaScript For The Web?

[smitty3268]

A better solution would be to just get Firefox to support NativeClient. Especially as Unity 3D (an another two major game engines I can't disclose atm) are going to support NaCl as a target in the next year or so. Funnily enough, they're using that to claim Linux support without any "native" Linux binaries.

That's sort of like suggesting they use Flash instead of WebGL. Probably a great idea in the short term, but rather missing the point of the exercise.

[Lennie]

Oh, you mean Java Applets? That sounds like a great idea.

No ActiveX :-)

(seriously, I've seen games in a long lost time of IE5, made with ActiveX which used Direct3D and all that)

[Lennie]

Not sure how useful this can really be given that most modern desktop OpenGL apps use various APIs and features that are not implemented in GLES/WebGL.

Likewise, while emacripten is a neat hack, there are a great many limitations imposed by JavaScript that hampers the ability to port a lot of interesting C/C++ code, not to mention the massive overhead compared even to well-written native JS. (I gave a talk a few months back on optimizing JS game engines, and needless to say it requires a great deal of hand tweaking and low-level knowledge of the language that retargetting compilers abstract away from the programmer.

A better solution would be to just get Firefox to support NativeClient. Especially as Unity 3D (an another two major game engines I can't disclose atm) are going to support NaCl as a target in the next year or so. Funnily enough, they're using that to claim Linux support without any "native" Linux binaries.

The web wasn't meant to be tied to any platform (Windows or Linux, BSD, Mac, BeOS, whatever), should it really be tied to processor instead ?

This is something Mozilla is very unlikely to adopt, Mozilla is about the open web. For everyone, everywhere.

[Lennie]

NaCl apps do not run on ARM devices

Not that I would want NaCl, I think it would be a bad thing for the web, but Wikipedia does mention:

"An ARM implementation was released in March 2010. x86-64 and IA-32 are also supported. As of March 2011, however, all three implementations could only use code compiled to the host's native instruction set."

Although if you read this article:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/it...nd-957478.html

Then their plan is to do the same things emscripten is doing. ;-)

The take LLVM and great some intermediate format and have that interpreted in the browser and execute it.