Sorry, it was you, not me, who shifted the topic from "merit" to "doesn't work cross-browser". I called that out because I'm pretty sure int64 and uint64, along with SIMD intrinsics, are coming to cross-browser JS -- while NaCl and PNaCl and in particular Pepper are not going cross-browser.
If you want to stick to merit-only arguments, please don't knock int64 as Mozilla-only or we'll circle back to the relative odds of JS standards evolving vs. infeasibility of standardizing Pepper + *NaCl.
On tone, I hope the above makes clear why I responded to your "not in other browsers" comment.
On purity, Mozilla has been faulted for being impure forever (not GPL, not XML/XHTML, not forsaking the average mass-market user for elite developers, etc. etc.). Our asm.js work is fully pragmatic and our talk at GDC (sorry it overlapped yours) had exactly the right tone. We are here to help game devs, without any purity tax.
On NaCl (not PNaCl) minus Pepper, I think we agree. We're looking at zerovm and similar uses of SFI in the context of the Servo project, for safer native code. That is where NaCl really shines, IMHO: safer native and OS/CPU-targeted code in native apps. It would be a shame if NaCl doesn't cater to this better use-case and instead tilts at the PNaCl cross-browser windmill.
If you want to stick to merit-only arguments, please don't knock int64 as Mozilla-only or we'll circle back to the relative odds of JS standards evolving vs. infeasibility of standardizing Pepper + *NaCl.
On tone, I hope the above makes clear why I responded to your "not in other browsers" comment.
On purity, Mozilla has been faulted for being impure forever (not GPL, not XML/XHTML, not forsaking the average mass-market user for elite developers, etc. etc.). Our asm.js work is fully pragmatic and our talk at GDC (sorry it overlapped yours) had exactly the right tone. We are here to help game devs, without any purity tax.
On NaCl (not PNaCl) minus Pepper, I think we agree. We're looking at zerovm and similar uses of SFI in the context of the Servo project, for safer native code. That is where NaCl really shines, IMHO: safer native and OS/CPU-targeted code in native apps. It would be a shame if NaCl doesn't cater to this better use-case and instead tilts at the PNaCl cross-browser windmill.
/be