Google Demonstrates Chrome Native Client With Bastion

Posted by Soulskill on Friday December 9, 2011 @10:45AM from the smashing-crates-in-the-browser dept.

Multiple readers sent word that Bastion, an action RPG from indie developer Supergiant Games originally made for Xbox Live Arcade, has shown up in the Chrome Web Store. The purpose of the move is to showcase the browser's Native Client technology. From the article: "Ian Ellison-Taylor, Google's director of product management for the open Web platform, said that Native Client, also called NaCl, can currently improve browser performance by 1 to 10 times. 'What would it be like if we could run native code inside the browser,' he asked the crowd, and he enumerated two goals for the Native Client project. He said Google wants to bring native applications to the Web for performance and security reasons, and it wants to enrich the Web ecosystem by bringing popular, long-in-use programming languages to the Web."

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Re:A type-safe subset of x86 instructions by shutdown+-p+now · 2011-12-09 12:16 · Score: 5, Informative

It's not type-safe (there are no types as such on assembly level, it's all just bytes and words), it's memory-safe.
More importantly, the subset of instructions available in NaCl allows one to do lower-level stuff than verifiable CIL instructions (JVM is always memory-safe). For example, NaCl permits pointer arithmetic.