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

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57534803-93/google-offers-low-budget-arm-based-chromebook/

by potkor • 14 years ago

43 34 14 years ago

news.cnet.com

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.

kevingadd• 14 years ago

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

willvarfar• 14 years ago

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

This means apps!?!

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

No, Chrome already has Apps.

It means faster, native apps.

cliffbean• 14 years ago

No, Chrome already has native apps -- NaCl. This headline is about PNaCl, the attempt to make native apps portable.

OldSchool• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

batgaijin2• 14 years ago

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.

majke2• 14 years ago

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

Tomdarkness• 14 years ago

Do you know why Mozilla does not seem interested in Pepper?

mccr84• 14 years ago

"Mozilla doesn't like Pepper" is a bit of an unfair characterization. A better description would be "only Google likes Pepper", because as far as I am aware Microsoft, Apple and Opera have not expressed any interest in implementing Pepper either. You just see more about Mozilla's thoughts on Pepper because it is a more open organization.

batgaijin2• 14 years ago

But what are the limits? Are there any? What system API does the implementation map to? Epoll on Linux automatically, kqueue on Mac OS X, and whatever on Windows?

wmf• 14 years ago

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.

mccr84• 14 years ago

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

justinschuh2• 14 years ago

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.

mccr84• 14 years ago

Of course, but surely this really cool project that Google has been working on for years and years deserves a bigger announcement than an aside in a netbook preview. Hopefully one will be coming along soon.

potkor• 14 years ago

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?

bcks• 14 years ago

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...

phaet0n• 14 years ago

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.

zurn2• 14 years ago

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.

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

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