
Google Details PNaCl Native Client LLVM Bitcode - GravityWell
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQyNTE
======
eliben
A couple of notes:

"Google has begun making public the details concerning their Portable Native
Client (PNaCl) implementation."

To be completely fair, PNaCl is part of Chromium, and hence an open source
project from the start. The code is freely available for anyone to see, check
out and build, and has always been.

"Portable Native Client comes down to compiling Google Native Client
applications to a subset of LLVM bitcode that can then basically run anywhere
that Native Client is supported. "

I suppose Michael Larabel meant to say "compiling C and C++ applications"
instead of "Google Native Client applications" here.

~~~
exDM69
> To be completely fair, PNaCl is part of Chromium, and hence an open source
> project from the start. The code is freely available for anyone to see,
> check out and build, and has always been.

I think the most important thing here is _not_ the code, but rather the
refinements to LLVM IR bitcode to make it more portable. Most of LLVM IR is
already CPU/platform agnostic but parts of it are closely tied to the target
architecture (which makes sense since LLVM IR was originally targeted at
compilers).

A standard portable subset of LLVM IR would be very welcome.

~~~
eliben
Well, there's a portable subset of LLVM IR there, for sure. Comments are
welcome - we are very interested in feedback.

------
est
Blogspam?

[http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2013-July/064394....](http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2013-July/064394.html)

~~~
tadfisher
Worse, it's Phoronix.

~~~
delroth
Hate all you want on Phoronix, but I still don't know any other good "news
aggregator" for X11, Linux GPU drivers and optimization news. It's not like
everything on Phoronix comes from -announce mailing lists, they do a pretty
good job at filtering noise from development mailing list and providing fresh
news. They also always link to the original source if you're not happy about
the quality of their articles.

------
mcosta
Is me alone who sees NaCl as another kind of flash? It is just a blob running
into a rectangle. No js accesible, almost no browser control over it. How web
is this?

~~~
Groxx
tbh, I see it as (possibly) a better java applet. with better OpenGL support,
so "real" games are actually feasible, and not even that hard.

Chrome is positioning itself very, very strongly as a _platform_ , not just a
browser, and this is a necessary part of that. I'm not a fan of this ever-
widening set of things browsers have to do (separate from each other /
external libs / etc) since it just raises the bar for any competitors, but I
must admit it is nicer for the user than all the past attempts.

~~~
bad_user
> _Chrome is positioning itself very, very strongly as a platform, not just a
> browser_

That makes no sense, because the browser is by definition a platform.

~~~
karl42
I don't know your definition of a browser, but in my opinion, a browser used
to be mainly a document viewer. This is changing now, but the original
statement does make sense in this context.

~~~
bad_user
When? In 1995?

------
VikingCoder
Almost the speed of native.

As secure as possible.

As portable as possible.

It's definitely an interesting feature set. I personally hope ASM.JS is able
to "catch up" to NaCl, but if it doesn't, then I hope PNaCl becomes widely
available.

------
ksec
I hope this approach wins instead of asm.js

