[cliffbean]

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.

[DannyBee]

This is not how it was introduced, the blog post was the introduction. We published earlier research papers because we publish papers.

The plan was always the same.

Before this, the project wasn't really real, it was just research.

If you consider this "public messaging", then I guess google should never release research papers or research SDK's without fear of being raked over the coals?

If so, that's a sad state of affairs.

[cliffbean]

You're right that the first link I posted is a research paper, and that it should be interpreted accordingly. It is interesting though that in the paper, they compare NaCl to other systems, some of which include ISA virtualization, and they specifically say "we made a deliberate choice against virtualization". And this paper is just a small sample of what Google was saying about NaCl in 2009. But you're right, it is still a research project at that point.

However, you apparently missed the second link I posted, which is in fact a blog post and an introduction. NaCl is no longer a research project there. In fact, the post itself specifically describes the difference between research releases and the release it is announcing.

[tptacek]

They held the sandbox breaking contest (our team came in second!) in 2009. You're suggesting they announced in 2011, right?