Google Chrome SVP says Portable NaCl will ship "in six weeks"

[potkor]

It's in the context of the Chromebook but probably it will be a general Chrome feature if it's to be useful.

This is great news for NaCl fans who have been mourning its limited potential due to its previously x86-bound nature.

The PNaCl project has been around for a while, but AFAIK this is the first time Google have actually announced it's going to be productized.

[batgaijin]

Can someone enlighten me about the Pepper API? Could I run a server with it? What would sort of limits does the network connection have? How many requests per second could it handle? How many simultaneous connections? What about bandwidth? etc. etc.

[majke]

Pepper is a new Plugin API for browsers proposed by Chrome: https://code.google.com/p/ppapi/

Plugin API is the magic responsible for Java or Flash in your browser. A plugin once installed on your PC may run in a number of browsers, as all use the same API - currently it is NPAPI.

NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API) is very old and Chrome with Pepper wants replace it.

Mozilla doesn't like Pepper, so at least for now Pepper is a Chrome-specific thing: https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper

[wmf]

NaCl and JavaScript have the same sandbox rules because they're both foreign code. Extensions have access to some APIs that normal code doesn't, but again those APIs are the same between NaCl and JS.

[OldSchool]

I wonder if Apple will selectively sue Samsung because it's a thin, rectangular, silver clamshell with black keys and a screen? (I like the Macbook Air btw)

[ams6110]

Samsung can claim they didn't copy Apple because their design has a big ugly hinge visible on the top.

[kevingadd]

Nice to see Google delivering on their promises here. I look forward to trying out PNaCl apps on Android in Chrome!

[phaet0n]

I'm sure Google's PNaCl ARM solution took this long only because they were waiting to have an easier technical time of it with A15 cores and hardware virtualization. My bet is that they've saved themselves a lot of hassle and gone with implementing a lightweight hypervisor for untrusted native code.

[zurn]

PNaCl is quite well documented. It involves LLVM bitcode and a verifier to prove it doesn't do anything naughty.

Requiring HW virtualization would defeat the purpouse of portability. It wouldn't fly on desktop or Android because of the HW and OS requirements.

[bcks]

Does anyone know how these work without an active internet connection? Is there an offline / synch option? I think the folks who most need cheap computers are also the ones with the spottiest access...

[willvarfar]

This is a very big deal for that new $249 ARM Chromebook they just announced, right?

This means apps!?!

[TazeTSchnitzel]

No, Chrome already has Apps.

It means faster, native apps.

[mccr8]

That's neat, but an odd thing to incidentally mention.

[justinschuh]

The announcement is about the new ARM-based Chromebooks, and PNaCl is the way to write performant native apps that run on all architectures supported by Chrome.

[potkor]

Agreed. Maybe they're testing the waters with the Chromebook and not updating the Android Chrome yet.

BTW is there a dev channel for Android Chrome?