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Google Demonstrates Chrome Native Client With Bastion
Multiple readers sent word that Bastion, an action RPG from indie developer Supergiant Games originally made for Xbox Live Arcade, has shown up in the Chrome Web Store.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."
can currently improve browser performance by 1 to 10 times
- this reminds me of the quote from the historical documents:
-Good Lord! That's over 5000 atmospheres of pressure!
-How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?
-Well, it was built for space travel, so anywhere between zero and one.
You can't handle the truth.
I'm guessing they mean that you are more secure now that you can run apps in your browser which you previously had to install into your OS. The privileges enjoyed by an NaCl browser app are really minimal compared to the same app installed with admin on Windows (which is how most users do it).
Regarding web standardization, note that NaCl is nothing like Flash or Silverlight: rather then replacing standard web technologies with proprietary technologies, it is primarily a way to optimize pieces of web technology. You take your bundle of HTML/CSS/Javascript and replace pieces of the javascript with native code. And you don't do it with some proprietary google language - you do it (eventually) with whatever language you want.
To me it seems like a reasonable way to move the web forward without subverting it (or even altering it much).
yeah, right; I'm going to trust italian software!?
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
Native Client is like a plugin that makes all other plugins obsolete.
-It can do everything you can do with Flash, Unity, Silverlight, etc.
-You can use any language to develop for it, C, C++, ObjC, Python, C#, you name it.
-Can access everything JS can (using the Pepper plugin API).
-It's from a trusted vendor (Google), so most people will not be afraid to install it.
-Will come pre-installed in the soon to be most popular web browser.
-It's open source
-It's much more secure than existing plugins due to sandboxing.
And, yes, I can understand HTML5 purists, but the truth is that:
1) Not everything can be made into a web application using HTML5+JS.
2) There's way too much code and applications written in other languages..
3) Cross-Platform web deployment is very attractive. Compile for x86 and ARM and 99.999% of the devices on the planet can be supported.
So, disable it if you don't want it, but this is a very attractive idea with a lot of potential for us developers, and even Adobe is trying somehting similar with Alchemy on Flash. It's a much more realistic way to bring actual real applications to the web than the dream that HTML5+JavaScript is.
NaCl is not portable. NaCl apps only run on x86 and x86_64, not ARM or PowerPC or anything else.
NaCL binaries are not portable in the same way I can't install the FireFox's Windows binaries on Linux (or the armel ".deb" from packages.debian.org on my amd64 computer), but honestly, who cares? Mozilla and Debian guys just compile it for each supported platform. There is also the possibility of creating a "fat nexe" that supports all platforms.
As a consequence, NaCl apps only run on Chrome (and on x86 and x86_64).
Is open source code on an open source browser. I would prefer it being a plugin (I think at some point there was one) so I can run it in all my browsers. But this is no different than any other proprietary feature on other browsers. I'm currently using Mozilla's proprietary "crypto" JavaScript API for an application, and it only runs on Mozilla's browsers. Not convenient, for sure, but what should I do? Not use the feature at all? Or try to make something valuable from it, so other developers might consider incorporating it?