Chrome To Deprecate PNaCl, Embrace New WebAssembly Standard (tomshardware.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday June 3, 2017 @05:34AM from the near-native-performance dept.

An anonymous reader quotes Tom's Hardware Google announced that its Portable Native Client (PNaCl) solution for making native code run inside the browser will be replaced by the new cross-browser web standard called WebAssembly... Even though Google open sourced PNaCl, as part of the Chromium project, Mozilla ended up creating its own alternative called "asm.js," an optimized subset of JavaScript that could also compile to the assembly language. Mozilla thought that asm.js was far simpler to implement and required no API compatibility, as PNaCl did. As these projects seemed to go nowhere, with everyone promoting their own standard, the major browser vendors seem to have eventually decided on creating WebAssembly. WebAssembly can give web apps near-native performance, offers support for more CPU features, and is simpler to implement in browsers and use by developers.

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PNaCl and NaCl are *not* virtual machines! by tlambert · 2017-06-03 06:53 · Score: 5, Informative

PNaCl and NaCl are *not* virtual machines!
Yes, they are sandboxed, but they are sandboxed by constraining the assembly language generated.
PNaCl differs only in that it sends the intermediate compiled code down to the browser to be processed in the final LLVM stage backend into assembly language within the browser.
The major reason for deprecating it is that a compiler back end is a lot to carry around for little benefit.
The reason the benefit is small, however, has less to do with PNaCl itself, and a lot more to do with how Google handles projects within Google, and my inability to actually pry my 20% time -- that I was promised when I was hired -- out of Google to do work on the problem.
I talk about it in another post.