

Google Chrome SVP says Portable NaCl will ship "in six weeks" - potkor
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57534803-93/google-offers-low-budget-arm-based-chromebook/
It's in the context of the Chromebook but probably it will be a general Chrome feature if it's to be useful.<p>This is great news for NaCl fans who have been mourning its limited potential due to its previously x86-bound nature.<p>The PNaCl project has been around for a while, but AFAIK
this is the first time Google have actually announced
it's going to be productized.
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batgaijin
Can someone enlighten me about the Pepper API? Could I run a server with it?
What would sort of limits does the network connection have? How many requests
per second could it handle? How many simultaneous connections? What about
bandwidth? etc. etc.

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majke
Pepper is a new Plugin API for browsers proposed by Chrome:
<https://code.google.com/p/ppapi/>

Plugin API is the magic responsible for Java or Flash in your browser. A
plugin once installed on your PC may run in a number of browsers, as all use
the same API - currently it is NPAPI.

NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API) is very old and Chrome with Pepper wants replace
it.

Mozilla doesn't like Pepper, so at least for now Pepper is a Chrome-specific
thing: <https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper>

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Tomdarkness
Do you know why Mozilla does not seem interested in Pepper?

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apetrovic
Both Google and Mozilla wants to obsolete your OS and move general computing
in the browser; Google is more pragmatic and sees the need for native code
apps on the client side (like games, image processing, etc) so they wants to
transform the browser into distribution platform for such apps. Mozilla crew,
on the other hand, holds high moral ground and lives in imaginary world where
_everything_ can be made with Web technologies, and if something isn't
possible right now, we should just wait couple of processor iterations and
couple of Web standard iterations.

If companies are people, Google would be someone like Linus, and Mozilla would
hang with RMS.

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OldSchool
I wonder if Apple will selectively sue Samsung because it's a thin,
rectangular, silver clamshell with black keys and a screen? (I like the
Macbook Air btw)

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ams6110
Samsung can claim they didn't copy Apple because their design has a big ugly
hinge visible on the top.

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kevingadd
Nice to see Google delivering on their promises here. I look forward to trying
out PNaCl apps on Android in Chrome!

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phaet0n
I'm sure Google's PNaCl ARM solution took this long only because they were
waiting to have an easier technical time of it with A15 cores and hardware
virtualization. My bet is that they've saved themselves a lot of hassle and
gone with implementing a lightweight hypervisor for untrusted native code.

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zurn
PNaCl is quite well documented. It involves LLVM bitcode and a verifier to
prove it doesn't do anything naughty.

Requiring HW virtualization would defeat the purpouse of portability. It
wouldn't fly on desktop or Android because of the HW and OS requirements.

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bcks
Does anyone know how these work without an active internet connection? Is
there an offline / synch option? I think the folks who most need cheap
computers are also the ones with the spottiest access...

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willvarfar
This is a very big deal for that new $249 ARM Chromebook they just announced,
right?

This means apps!?!

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TazeTSchnitzel
No, Chrome already has Apps.

It means faster, native apps.

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cliffbean
No, Chrome already has native apps -- NaCl. This headline is about PNaCl, the
attempt to make native apps portable.

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daeken
NaCl for ARM isn't shipping, is it? Last I heard, there were some serious
issues with it, but that may have changed (I hope!).

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mccr8
That's neat, but an odd thing to incidentally mention.

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justinschuh
The announcement is about the new ARM-based Chromebooks, and PNaCl is the way
to write performant native apps that run on all architectures supported by
Chrome.

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mccr8
Of course, but surely this really cool project that Google has been working on
for years and years deserves a bigger announcement than an aside in a netbook
preview. Hopefully one will be coming along soon.

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justinschuh
PNaCl was announced quite a while ago, and is a publicly developed open source
project. The new detail here is just when it should start shipping to stable
for use in Apps and Extensions.

