Moonlight Now Does GPU Acceleration

[gedgon]

What a waste of money and developer resources...

Haha, /me pointed similar statement @ YT, and quess what? Comment removed
I didn't expected that.

Mr Icaza, your reputation really precedes you.

[BlackStar]

it may be oss and thats great, but is not working for what people need it and thats: netflix.

netflix works on everything except desktop linux.

is like having an oss flash that cant load youtube videos... what would that be good for?

i dont see much future for this project, specially with html5.

Fortunately, netflix users are a tiny tiny minority of the world. Look at the big picture: 99.999% simply doesn't care one way or another. Some may actually find the lack of DRM refreshing.

Now, I agree that Silverlight/Moonlight doesn't have much of a future in the web. Microsoft is now pitching Silverlight as a platform for rich desktop and intranet applications, plus a content (video) delivery mechanism. For regular web development, they actually support HTML5+CSS3+JS+SVG now (which is a very surprising turn, given their past).

Personally speaking, I consider Silverlight/Moonlight as a low-cost way to build simple, cross-platform GUIs. It is a big step up from Swing/WinForms/WPF (which are the de-facto standards in the corporate world) and has a significantly lower development cost than Qt/GTK/Cocoa. Perfect for LOB applications.

I also consider the cross-platform nature of Silverlight an advantage. You will probably not see any Silverlight applications on your desktop, but Silverlight *can* influence a company's decision to move from Windows to Linux (if their day-to-day infrastructure is built on Silverlight then a Linux transition is possible. Think of Moonlight as a trojan horse into the Microsoft-held corporate world).

[madjr]

So we'd have to rely on yet another DRM-laden binary blob with more security wholes than an old rag. Thanks, but no thanks. At least Moonlight is OSS.

it may be oss and thats great, but is not working for what people need it and thats: netflix.

netflix works on everything except desktop linux.

is like having an oss flash that cant load youtube videos... what would that be good for?

i dont see much future for this project, specially with html5.

[BlackStar]

well gnash is dead, long live html5


As for moonlight, guess it still doesnt work with netflix...

netflix should had gone with flash, like hulu

So we'd have to rely on yet another DRM-laden binary blob with more security wholes than an old rag. Thanks, but no thanks. At least Moonlight is OSS.

[madjr]

Yeah! If all this manpower had helped projects like gnash instead, we would be in a much better position today.

well gnash is dead, long live html5


As for moonlight, guess it still doesnt work with netflix...

netflix should had gone with flash, like hulu

[Apopas]

What a waste of money and developer resources...

Yeah! If all this manpower had helped projects like gnash instead, we would be in a much better position today.

[BlackStar]

Javascript plus markup isn't powerful or extensible enough for general purpose development. You would never write a client application so stupidly so why a web application?

You are quite mistaken. Gnome Shell and Unity3d both use Javascript on the desktop.

That's why I see HTML5's specialized features as a stopgap measure and not a long-term solution. Plugins like Silverlight are marginally better, but then there's the problem of having each user install 3000 different incompatible plugin frameworks just to browse the web. The ultimate answer would be something like a standardized sandboxed bytecode interpreter, compiler-compiler, or perhaps llvm-like infrastructure targetable by arbitrary languages and capable of executing arbitrary code in any browser on any platform with acceptable performance. Java is currently the closest thing to that.

Java applets are long dead and buried. Noone uses them anymore, and with good reason: they are slow, user-unfriendly and unsafe.

Silverlight would achieve what you propose (fast, safe and a model that is far superior to HTML+JS), but Microsoft fucked this one up from the get go. They should have standardized and open-sourced it from the beginning (with patent grant). Not that Apple and Linux zealots would have accepted that, but you never know.

NaCL from Google is promising, but it won't become viable for years.

As things stand, we'll be stuck with HTML/CSS/JS/SVG and half-assed <video> and <audio> for another decade at least. And IE6 refuses to die.

[KAMiKAZOW]

turns out at least one of his recent projects has been bringing GPU acceleration to Moonlight

Adobe/Macromedia should have done the same thing to Flash 10 years ago but we still don't have a Flash version that accelerates its vector graphics via OpenGL.

[Smorg]

Yes, "using javascript to manipulate DOM elements from SVG and expecting browsers to magically hardware accelarate it" is easily superior to loading a foreign process that hosts a VM, especially if it's one as insecure as Java or Flash.

Javascript plus markup isn't powerful or extensible enough for general purpose development. You would never write a client application so stupidly so why a web application? I hate Java and Flash, and I wouldn't call either secure. Javascript as a language is actually not that bad. However the paradigm of general application development through manipulation of web documents is even more braindamaged. That's about the least ideal solution to the problem of high performance cross-platform networked computing I can imagine.

That's why I see HTML5's specialized features as a stopgap measure and not a long-term solution. Plugins like Silverlight are marginally better, but then there's the problem of having each user install 3000 different incompatible plugin frameworks just to browse the web. The ultimate answer would be something like a standardized sandboxed bytecode interpreter, compiler-compiler, or perhaps llvm-like infrastructure targetable by arbitrary languages and capable of executing arbitrary code in any browser on any platform with acceptable performance. Java is currently the closest thing to that.

[BlackStar]

Java applets? That's so 1998.

The world has moved on. Fortunately.

Yes, "using javascript to manipulate DOM elements from SVG and expecting browsers to magically hardware accelarate it" is easily superior to loading a foreign process that hosts a VM, especially if it's one as insecure as Java or Flash.

Hardware acceleration is pretty much a solved problem - all next-gen browsers will have it (apart from Opera whose software renderer is so fast it actually doesn't need it).