MAME Running In Chrome

An anonymous reader writes to point out this interesting outgrowth of Google's Native Client: a Google engineer has ported MAME 0.143 to the browser-based platform, and written about the process in detail, outlining the overall strategy employed as well as specific problems that MAME presented. An impressive postscript from the conclusion: "The port of MAME was relatively challenging; combined with figuring out how to port SDL-based games and load resources in Native Client, the overall effort took us about 4 days to complete."

Comments

Is Google trying to fragment web?

[SharkLaser]

We had that shit before with ActiveX. We need standards, not some stuff that only works in Chrome. However, I guess it's better for Google - now they have something that only works with Chrome. So when new users go to some web site it will say that they need to download and install Chrome to use it. Old users will also be locked to Chrome.

Don't do that. Only use standards like HTML5 that work in every browser.

Re:Is Google trying to fragment web?

[errandum]

I don't see your problem. It's not like they won't be supporting the standard, investing on their platform (that they even consider big enough to be your whole PC UI).

I, for one, like the idea that I can have desktop quality applications running independent of platform on my browser - and wouldn't mind if this became the standard. By uniting all OS'es under this platform, I don't believe that there is fragmentation (what exists now IS fragmentation)

Re:Is Google trying to fragment web?

[raburton]

> I, for one, like the idea that I can have desktop quality applications running independent of platform on my browser - and wouldn't mind if this became the standard

The browser is your platform, that's the whole concept behind moving everything to web based. That's a good thing if you take the traditional view that the OS is the platform - now you can run any old OS you like (with a standards compliant browser) and you'll be able to run the apps.

This doesn't make you platform independent though, it makes you OS independent - all you've done is just redefined 'platform'. While apps only use standards you maintain independence. As soon as they use non-standard extensions you are no longer independent and now you are limited again. In this case you are limited to Chrome.

In this respect it's really no different to ActiveX. Just because google have published the workings of this doesn't make it a standard and there is really no reason for all other browsers to implement it. And if it isn't a standard and isn't available in all browsers people working with it will be forcing their choice of platform on their users and we're back to where we started. Why don't we all just run Windows and use ActiveX?

Richard.

Re:Is Google trying to fragment web?

[Justin_Schuh]

I can appreciate your confusion, but comparing NaCl to ActiveX doesn't really make sense. Once you instantiate an ActiveX control it runs arbitrary code at your full user privilege. Whereas NaCl is much more accurately compared to the restricted execution environment of a virtual machine, such as Java, .NET CLR, or even JITed JavaScript. It's just that NaCl virtualizes a well-defined subset of an existing hardware instruction set, rather than one developed specifically for it. That virtualization (and the associated instruction validation) is the primary security mechanism, and is typical of a VM environment. The process sandbox is just a defense-in-depth measure (and a very strong one) layered underneath an existing VM sandbox.

However, there's no reason to take my word for it. If you research it a bit you should find that NaCl has a comparable or (in most cases) a more robust security model compared to the web-delivered execution environments most people are already running.

Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

- They had to adapt the makefiles because they didn't support cross-compilation. However they did that by using ad-hoc hacks specific to Native Client rather than doing it the right way: they still compile stuff that should be compiled for the host for the target, and then run it on the host with an emulator. They also chose to remove use of makedep entirely, meaning their "port" is not something that anyone can keep or that could be integrated upstream. It's something you can throw away once finished, and that you'll need to redo whenever a new version gets released.

- Native Client runs applications in a minimal virtualized operating system for sandboxing, that only has partial POSIX support and doesn't even have support for the libc fopen/fclose functions (at least this is what the authors claim -- googling about Native Client says it supports POSIX file I/O just fine, and C I/O should be the obvious thing to come with it). The provided libc implements many things as macros, which is a cause for several conflicts. The sandbox also disallows certain classes of instructions because they are "unsafe", and in particular most uses of inline assembly are likely to not work (again, this is what the authors claim, googling says native client supports hand-coded assembly code just fine).
Again, the modifications they did to the code was very ad-hoc and is not proper support for an extra operating system in the MAME codebase, and is therefore not suitable for inclusion upstream.

So finally, they claim something was "relatively challenging" and they did it "in 4 days". This is quite contradictory, if it was challenging it would have taken significantly more time. In particular, for most software, it is not uncommon to take several months to port to another platform, and typically takes much more work than what they've done.
What they did is adapt a piece of cross-platform software to work on an extra platform that is very similar to one other platform it already supports. The process in doing so was fairly straightforward and accessible to any software engineer. They did it quickly and badly, preferring ad-hoc hacks over good software architecture. They didn't fully port it and disabled significant parts of the software and reduced its performance.
Not really a great achievement.

Two BIG differences between NaCl and ActiveX

[YA_Python_dev]

1) NaCl is free/open source software, both the SDK and the client implementation in Chromium; ActiveX was proprietary and every program required to be signed by Microsoft to run by default;

2) NaCl is secure (see this IEEE article, it's very interesting) and designed to be portable to different browsers and OSes; you can safely run untrusted code, just like you would do with JavaScript; ActiveX required not only to trust that the controls weren't malicious, but also to trust that they all were free of security bugs: if only a single signed ActiveX control somewhere had a security bug, it could be exploited to p0wn Windows PCs (that's why Microsoft had a growing list of signed controls and another growing list of signed-but-blacklisted controls).

Native Client is certainly not perfect, but please don't compare it to ActiveX. Entirely different beast.

Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.