I see that some people wonder why this is useful. I wonder the same thing, and in general I don't like the concept of NaCl, which will be ActiveX all over again, even though it has a better security sandbox, as poor security wasn't the biggest problem of ActiveX ... seems to me like Google is trying really hard to be like Microsoft.<p>However, I can't help but notice that Ruby, as a programming language, is getting ported everywhere. It runs on all desktop operating systems, it runs on top of the JVM and on top of Android. For iOS there are 2 competing versions already. For .NET the interest was low, so IronRuby is kind of dying, but it's still decent for a .NET implementation. Ruby MRI evolved a lot from 1.8 to 1.9, being a decent VM for a scripting language. Rubinius is much like Smalltalk, having the standard library in Ruby itself, allowing you to access the internals of the VM. JRuby is awesome.<p>Then there are the specs. Amongst the scripting languages people use today, Ruby has some of the best specs. It started with RubySpec, which are test suites started by the people working on Rubinius and now used by everybody else. And now Ruby is becoming an ISO standard. This makes me happy because when it comes to equivalent dynamic languages, there is no spec other than the reference implementation, making third-party implementations an unfeasible task. Perl 5 is a really good example of this.<p>So does anybody else find this exciting? As a language, Ruby is really mature these days, while still being fun and productive. Much like Smalltalk was back in the day.
On a complete tangent: of all the language runtimes I'd expect to be converted to run in NaCl, I don't think Ruby's would top my list for "immediate practical uses." On the other hand, porting the Erlang BEAM VM--and thus allowing a web client to become a node in an Erlang process network, and have arbitrary code pushed to and executed on it by the network--would have tons of relevant applications. Anyone working on this? Should <i>I</i> start working on this?
I always thought Ruby used Git (<a href="https://github.com/ruby/ruby" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ruby/ruby</a>), but this links to an SVN repo.<p>What's up with that?
Here is the same commit in GitHub: <a href="https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/76bc2d1ed7f13fb329c33f48756ea3c24c59a6ea" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ruby/ruby/commit/76bc2d1ed7f13fb329c33f48...</a>
This is neat.<p>It would be fantastic if someone did the same thing with the jvm. Then I could use Java or Clojure or whatever JVM-based language I wanted - and make use of tons of pre-existing libraries.<p>NaCL is the sandbox I want, not the craplet sandbox.
With NaCL I can use C libs and access useful OS services without having to sign the app and ask the user for permission to delete their hard drive.
On the one hand I get why people are excited about this and why people like coffeescript, especially when source maps start working in inspector/firebug. You can write web apps in the language you love and know. Cool!<p>On the other hand, this really sucks. Javascript is just maturing to where it is really awesome! And there is a ton of collaboration among app developers because javascript was the only game in town for so long.<p>Of course people will continue to collaborate but not, I fear, at the same level. 3rd party libraries will continue to be available, but not as many will fit in so neatly with people coding in other languages.<p>This has already come up a few times with coffeescript and in a couple years when it is truly easy for people to work in other languages, we'll have a tower of babel effect.<p>JS is really good. It isn't that hard to learn if you already know other languages. It has warts but it is also very powerful so often it is worth it (check out the lines of code and speed vs other languages):<p><a href="http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/javascript.php" rel="nofollow">http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/javascript.php</a>