How is Mozilla's control over the W3C HTML standards process proprietary in any way? Mozilla is only one of a number of vendors on the W3C, and is certainly not the most powerful of those vendors.

I didn't suggest that Mozilla has sole control over the HTML (etc.) standards. It's one of the five browser vendors who collectively have de facto control over the Web platform, and it's one of the four non-MS browser vendors who collectively have de facto control over "open Web standards". Thus, for instance, the reason that Google Native Client is not set fair to become an "open Web standard" is because three of the four non-MS vendors oppose it for reasons of self-interest. Similarly, it's going to have trouble getting real-world adoption because MS opposes it too, for basically the same reasons. You'll note how the desires or interests of other actors, like the non-browser-vendor W3C members or Web users and developers at large, play no role in the calculation.

> The reason that Google Native Client is not set fair to become an "open Web standard" is because three of the four non-MS vendors oppose it for reasons of self-interest.

As a user, I don't want to see NaCl's compile-once-per-each-architecture model become part of the web. It's true browsers oppose it out of self interest, but NaCl has its own problems that haven't been solved.

PNaCl is a good start and much more in the vein of an open web that isn't tied to a particular platform. And whatever benefits an Open Web, Mozilla will inevitably support, as it sustains their business model. NaCl doesn't do anything for browser makers, but it also doesn't help me as a user.

So what remaining problems with NaCl's compile-once-per-each-architecture model do you believe can't be solved by the combination of multi-architecture compilers (llvm, gcc ...) on the developer/server end and PNaCl on the client? Obviously the implementation is incomplete and immature, but Mozilla and Opera aren't even pretending that their opposition to NaCl is based on the immaturity of the implementation.

> And whatever benefits an Open Web, Mozilla will inevitably support, as it sustains their business model.

Mozilla inevitably supports and benefits from an Open Web only to the extent that you accept Mozilla's rather Newspeak definition of the Open Web as "a Web whose client API and runtime is under the shared control of a small group of browser vendors". If you have a less Orwellian kind of openness in mind, then it's clearly not true: Mozilla benefits from its shared control over the Web platform in largely the same way that MS benefits from its control over the Windows platform, and just like MS it has a strong self-interest in not seeing its platform "commoditised". As if that weren't perfectly clear already, then Chromeless underlines it. I assume you accept that Mozilla has a self-interest in seeing Chromeless succeed? The reason that Chromeless has a chance of hitting the big-time on the desktop is almost solely because Javascript and friends are popular on the Web client, and the ultimate reason for that is because JS and friends are bolted in and difficult to avoid on the web client.

Well, for a start there's the problem that LLVM itself is architecture-dependent, last I checked. It's not as arhictecture-dependent as assembly but the last time I looked you couldn't generate the same LLVM on x86 and x86-64, say. Has that changed?

It looks like PNaCl aims to "solve" this problem by using 32-bit-targeted LLVM... including 32-bit pointer alignment. It's not immediately obvious how portable this would be to some hardware, and more importantly I'm not aware of any plans to support anything other than x86 and ARM initially (well, and x86-64 using its ability to run 32-bit code as far as I can tell). Am I just missing something on this front?

If I'm not missing anything, then this project's main impact if it caught on would be to restrict the set of hardware on which you can access web content, which is NOT a good thing.

> Well, for a start there's the problem that LLVM itself is architecture-dependent, last I checked.

The idea is not to produce a single cross-platform binary using LLVM - let alone using GCC! - but to produce a set of NaCl binaries for common archs from your portable HLL code using a cross-platform compiler - like LLVM, or GCC - plus PNaCl (or whatever) as the wildcard. Content negotiation is your friend.

> It looks like PNaCl aims to "solve" this problem by using 32-bit-targeted LLVM... including 32-bit pointer alignment. It's not immediately obvious how portable this would be to some hardware,

shrug I haven't heard of any major problems in converting LLVM IR to decently-performing assembler in various archs, so I presume that PNaCl will be able to do okay, especially since the bar is not set very high: consistently world-beating performance is not a necessity in a backstop solution. And if you're on a new or obscure platform (or, er, IE/Windows/x86-64) you're not guaranteed the swiftest Javascript speeds either. The likely worst is that PNaCl will need a redesign: see below.

> and more importantly I'm not aware of any plans to support anything other than x86 and ARM initially (well, and x86-64 using its ability to run 32-bit code as far as I can tell). Am I just missing something on this front?

As I said in my previous post "Obviously the implementation is incomplete and immature, but Mozilla and Opera aren't even pretending that their opposition to NaCl is based on the immaturity of the implementation." Seriously, if the problem with NaCl is that it's not mature and widely ported enough yet, then there's an obvious solution to that.

> I haven't heard of any major problems in converting LLVM IR to decently-performing assembler

But normally when you create LLVM IR you can choose what your pointer-size representation is, as I understand. Again, I could be completely off base here; I've just read some of the docs and talked to people who have worked with LLVM, not worked with it myself. Please tell me if I'm wrong!

The problem with PNaCl is not that it's not widely ported enough "yet", but rather that there are no plans for a way to run it on platforms what PNaCl hasn't been ported to. Compare this to JS, where you can get JS working on a new platform in fairly short order (e.g. by just compiling Spidermonkey, which is largely fairly portable C code and has a platform-independent interpreter). Now your new platform won't have a JIT yet at that point, so performance may not be great, but at least you'll have a fighting chance at using the web. You won't have that without a pretty large porting job if NaCl is in wide use.

> Well, for a start there's the problem that LLVM itself is architecture-dependent, last I checked. It's not as arhictecture-dependent as assembly but the last time I looked you couldn't generate the same LLVM on x86 and x86-64, say. Has that changed?

LLVM bytecode is 100% architecture and platform independent, unless you call into platform-specific bits or into blobs of machine code.

OK, so in that case what http://llvm.org/docs/FAQ.html#platformindependent is telling me is that it's not possible to produce said LLVM bytecode from C or C++ code in general, right?

And if I read http://llvm.org/docs/LangRef.html correctly, some bitcode is "not supported by all targets". How is that reconciled with "100% platform and architecture independent"?

Hmm, you're quite right. A better way of putting this would be: a large subset of LLVM IR is platform independent, but not all. My mistake.