Reply To: The Mill's Competition: Can it still win?

You miss my point entirely, and your conception of what it means to compete against a technology is too narrow.

A key advantage of the Mill is supposed to be security. But the efficient sandboxing that WebAssembly provides means that the world now has a way to make C and C++ much safer without needing the hardware to zero out memory, among other things. This substantially decreases the appeal of buying Mill hardware for many of us, since we can make a cheap software change rather than an expensive hardware change.

I was hoping to receive a compelling argument for why the Mill would still be compelling.

A 35% overhead for WASM only sounds big to C/C++ afficionados who don’t realize that a large fraction of all software is written in JavaScript (200% slower than C) or Python (2,500% slower than C); no end user will choose a Mill over others due to trivial differences they can’t even detect.

Data centers care more about energy efficiency, but if their customers can’t get easily their software to run on the Mill then it doesn’t matter.

The hardware world is moving quickly. I hope you all can release soon so the world doesn’t pass you by; “WebAssembly is not a hardware ISA” doesn’t matter and will not save you. Only a 5-10x advantage in some meaningful dimension will. Does the Mill have one?