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mantrax5 | 11 years ago

I actually did read it. And I'm responding to the idea that "see, you complained, and Google changed it, so your former complaints are now misunderstandings" is really not a valid thesis.

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DannyBee|11 years ago

Your claim that it was ever meant to stay "an x86 sandbox" is contradicted by a lot of things, including the actual launch announcement for NACL:

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/08/native-client-brings-...

" The next milestone for Native Client is architecture independence: Portable Native Client (PNaCl) will achieve this by using LLVM bitcode as the basis for the distribution format for Native Client content, translating it to the actual target instruction set before running. "

I actually dislike PNaCL for a different set of reasons, but claiming it was built as an x86 sandbox, and meant to stay that way, is just revisionist history. If you believed otherwise, it was, in fact, your misunderstanding.

cliffbean|11 years ago

Your history omits an earlier chapter, which was the period during which Google introduced NaCl to the world.

http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/34913.pdf (2009)

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/sneak-peek-at-native-client... (2010)

No mention of PNaCL anywhere. Eventually they did change their public messaging away from x86 sandbox and towards PNaCl, though not before causing lots of external confusion and fear. And even then, with the time it took to get PNaCl released, some of the external confusion persisted.

The earlier poster does indeed seem to have misunderstood the history, but it's easy to see where such misunderstanding may come from.