However, just as the functional programming community has been arguing for years that ML is more optimizable than C, we have serious doubts as to whether or not highly optimized implementations are practical to implement. Our proposal is also designed to run on a wide variety of platforms, is open and extensible, and is as secure as the scripting language chosen. Basically, it is mostly a matter of programming paradigm. ActiveVRML comes from a functional programming heritage. Our proposal is a more traditional event or message-passing system, which we expect to be used with procedural scripting languages such as Java.
Procedural programming is much easier for most people to understand than functional programming.
Our proposal will be much easier to implement. Microsoft has promised to deliver a sample implementation. However, an efficient implementation of their proposal will require a very sophisticated implementation, and we believe they are likely to omit such optimizations from their sample implementation. Our proposal does not depend on a highly optimized implementation to get acceptable performance. Our proposal will work better with existing modeling and animation tools.