Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I just came across Google Native Client
Now, it looks really interesting that they ported Quake to run on a Browser and you can run C++ code on a browser to process things more quickly, but I am trying to understand, what is the practical usage of NaCl?
What is the vision behind this by Google? To run software as a service on their "cloud" OS..err browser?
For example: Run Photosphop CS 5 on your browser?!
Anything you can do with ActiveX, but far more secure.
Elaboration:
Google Native Client allows you to run machine code locally and natively, but sandboxed insofar as only allowing access to protected memory regions and disabling exploits in the machine code relating to processor errata (certain sequences of machine code operations which act strangely on particular processors). Additionally, certain APIs are available (such as OpenGL) and there is interprocess communication with Javascript running with the page, allowing webapps which have a fast, powerful native backend.
It would be quite difficult to use the Win32 API to generate any native windows or controls with Google Native Client, whereas it’d be probably a bit easier with ActiveX. However, ActiveX is generally used with things like “Quake Live” to provide a fast, native experience for the player, and additionally for Internet Explorer ‘plug-ins’ — the Flash plug-in is ActiveX, for instance, and uses native code (i.e., the plugin is compiled to machine code).