Native Client: A Technology for Running Native Code on the Web

[andreyf]

A coworker: "Yay! Google is re-imlementing ActiveX!"

[tptacek]

Your coworker doesn't really understand ActiveX; ActiveX controls execute unchecked native x86 code with full access to the system call table. NaCL falls somewhere in between VMWare and the Java Bytecode Verifier.

[pierrefar]

I hope it's a bit more stable than that!

[frogger]

Yahoo! has already released a very similar "BrowserPlus" ... http://browserplus.yahoo.com/

[wmf]

They don't look that similar, since BrowserPlus doesn't appear to run arbitrary untrusted native code.

[pierrefar]

It's game over for Microsoft. The OS will become even more irrelvant. Adobe should be really worried too - they both just might disappear into a silvery lit air :)

Let's just hope Google doesn't mess this opportunity up. This is the silver bullet and they get to shoot it only once and they must not miss. No beta tags.

[tptacek]

It was game over long before NaCL, which is why I'm not bullish on this particular browser plugin: very, very few information problems people need solved require native code, and those few problems are already pretty well represented. If this was a killer problem, the JVM applet plugin would have evolved faster.

[brandonkm]

I wouldn't say game over just yet, there is still much to be determined in this space and with this recent technology.

I first thought the same thing also, but looking at it more objectively we have to see how users adopt native client.

[socksandsandals]

History will judge this to be our day's version of VBA.

[tocomment]

Could you run a Python interpreter in this, or Perl?

[andr]

Better yet, you can run a JavaScript interpreter in there. Firefox, even.

[tptacek]

Yes. Of course, you can do that in Javascript, too.

[tlrobinson]

It seems like NaCl should be part of Gears, no?

[andr]

I guess metaprogramming is out of the question.

[wmf]

Not necessarily, although you won't be doing any JIT.