Actually the more I think about it, the more I think that if we can get the privacy right, a web-based node would make a tremendous difference in the speed at which the network will be adopted, even if it is less efficient that a native version.
In addition, the node ecosystem fosters libraries reuse and fine granularity in libraries. For example, the bittorrent-dht library, which implements the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table, has many dependencies such as k-bucket, that can be reused in implementing the SAFE DHT. It might actually be a reasonable amount of work to port the current C++ implementation to Node. I’ll try a few things in the next weeks and report back. I’ll also continue following webtorrent, since its planned architecture is really adapted to the SAFE context.