Native Client (Google's NaCl)

kusma: there’s also the compilation step where the code is run through a modified version of gcc that secures that the compiled code is well behaved. All this is documented and open source.

niels: Gah, I’m sounding like a zealot. I’m really not :)

My angle is this: web is great for obvious reasons, but I’m not willing to put a lot of effort into making a demo for web if the quality is drastically reduced. With WebGL so far, it’s just not good enough. OK for smaller GPU-only things, but those godawful demos that the mozilla team put out was a big disappointment, I think.

People seem to “forgive” alot of awfulness as long as it’s “web-based”.

Btw, I’m not looking at NaCl because I prefer C++ over JavaScript — in the presence of Emscripten and http://www.mandreel.com you can quite nicely compile your C++ code to JS.

niels: Gah, I’m sounding like a zealot. I’m really not :)

Me neither, though I do suspect I am a bit skeptical every so many hours of the day:)

My angle is this: web is great for obvious reasons, but I’m not willing to put a lot of effort into making a demo for web if the quality is drastically reduced. With WebGL so far, it’s just not good enough. OK for smaller GPU-only things, but those godawful demos that the mozilla team put out was a big disappointment, I think.

I don’t know the specifics of the performance but I can certainly imagine it being suboptimal as I do know what’s going on to facilitate it under the hood :) And I really hope that it gets better over time by way of communities remaining active and technology developers spending adequate time and resources. It’s all relatively new so it might just need more time to get somewhat on par with nowadays native-built applications. That way the need for building native applications will become even smaller than it is today.

(and those Moz demos.. well.. perhaps thats also a matter of talent for selling their stuff on their part)

To me it feels like making an application, or lets just say demo, that a) uses x86/x64 native code and b) only runs in a Chrome browser is just a niche thing. And it remains to be seen how the efforts balance out, because on one hand the native modules are somewhat restricted compared to an actual native application but you do get to do most if not all of the effort implied by coding something in C/CPP. Of course a few things might be easier to get running out-of-the-box using existing technologies (I’m thinking scripting, image loading, audio, that kind of deal) and having different native and non-native components talk to one another, but that’s speculative for now, at least it is for me :)

But at the end of the day it won’t result in webcontent seamlessly viewable by most users.

People seem to “forgive” alot of awfulness as long as it’s “web-based”.

Feel free to elaborate. I’ve noticed the lower standards among developers and users as well but I wonder if that’s not just a generic thing. If you surf around looking for native developer screenies and demos the majority of it also appears to be crap :) Why would that be different on the web?

Btw, I’m not looking at NaCl because I prefer C++ over JavaScript — in the presence of Emscripten and http://www.mandreel.com you can quite nicely compile your C++ code to JS.

*click*

a) bah I still have phpbb-codes burned into my brain
b) i’m going to the beach muchachos \o

• This reply was modified 268 days ago by  niels.
• This reply was modified 268 days ago by  niels. Reason: grrr
• This reply was modified 268 days ago by  niels. Reason: grr*grr
• This reply was modified 268 days ago by  niels.

chrome runs a verification pass on the binary executable (.nexe) and checks that it conforms to a certain set of rules before executing it. So in principle you can use whatever compiler you want to generate that .nexe.