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What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

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Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#61

Post by dpe82 »

petegrif wrote: post #36
twoodfin wrote: post #14

I think Microsoft really missed a good bet by not embracing NaCl years ago. They have a huge preexisting native codebase. Probably a plurality of their development teams are native code-focused. Their customers employ hundreds of thousands of native developers and probably billions of lines of native code. C/C++ is such an inescapable part of their ecosystem that after almost a decade of selling C#/.NET as the future…

Agreed. And I still don't understand Mozilla's problem with NaCl. They argue that js is now nearly as fast as native. Well...even if that were true it ignores the fact that as you point out there is huge investment in legacy code that NaCl unlocks AND it ignores the fact that js makes it easy to copy what may be valuable IP.

And for some things, "nearly as fast" isn't nearly fast enough, and in some cases (eg. media processing) you still need the very tight control over the CPU that C gives you.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#62

Post by bad_user »

twoodfin wrote: post #14

I think Microsoft really missed a good bet by not embracing NaCl years ago. They have a huge preexisting native codebase. Probably a plurality of their development teams are native code-focused. Their customers employ hundreds of thousands of native developers and probably billions of lines of native code. C/C++ is such an inescapable part of their ecosystem that after almost a decade of selling C#/.NET as the future…

I think Microsoft refusing to support NaCl is one of the best things they did. For once they pulled their head out of their ass and thought about the benefits of an open web.

I'm seeing a lot of comments here in support for NaCl, so apparently people have forgotten (or never lived) the days of ActiveX. I am not buying the conspiracy theory bits of this article, I also regret waisting time reading it ; however that doesn't mean NaCl isn't a bad idea.

    As a multi-vendor standard with an 
    open source implementation ...
Dude, seriously, don't you think these "vendors" had good reasons to dismiss NaCl?

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#63

Post by modeless »

twoodfin wrote: post #14

I think Microsoft really missed a good bet by not embracing NaCl years ago. They have a huge preexisting native codebase. Probably a plurality of their development teams are native code-focused. Their customers employ hundreds of thousands of native developers and probably billions of lines of native code. C/C++ is such an inescapable part of their ecosystem that after almost a decade of selling C#/.NET as the future…

The whole point of NaCl is the sandbox that blocks access to Microsoft's Windows APIs. Adopting it wouldn't have benefited Microsoft at all. What Microsoft should have done is built the CLR into IE as a JavaScript alternative instead of bolting a crippled version on the side (in the form of Silverlight). They could have controlled the best Web development platform out there, but that opportunity is long gone.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#64

Post by forgotusername »

Matt_Cutts wrote: post #60
joshu wrote: post #42

what's the unicode symbol for bong hits?

I laughed hard enough at this comment that I woke my wife up.

Thanks, Matt "lol bongs" Cutts, your mockery proved a meaningful critique. Often people laugh and act juvenile when otherwise they might cry.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#65

Post by nextparadigms »

Why is the performance impact of the sandbox with Intel code only 1% while the AMD and ARM code 7%? Is it just because they haven't focused much on optimizing for those or any other reason? I would expect them to at least focus more on ARM, especially if they are porting it to Android.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#66

Post by einhverfr »

nl wrote: post #49
nknight wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RE this whole conspiracy (not mocking it by calling it that...) Then I will. It's a conspiracy theory, worthy of all the mocking typically associated with such a thing. Anyone who's been watching Google long enough, closely enough, knows how out of character this would be. Such efforts, not to mention the purported motivation, is not in their nature. Google employees start hundreds (thousands?) of new projects ever…

Speaking of conspiracy theories, from the footnotes: I'm strongly of the belief that Google's internal strategy has long surpassed "organising the world's information", and is now something like "become the world's biggest private intelligence agency.", but that's a paranoid side-note.. ask me more on this at your peril. ;) http://www.hackerspews.com/

Well, they certainly have become the world's largest adware vendor, and that is hard to deny. The problem is that they want to aggregate more and more information from each of us in order to sell more ads. This makes them the world's largest spyware vendor too.

So I think that comment is just a little over the top, it's not that far beyond what the undisputed reality is.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#67

Post by willvarfar »

smosher wrote: post #24

The main hack done to the compiler is that generated code avoids certain constructs that inhibit perfect static analysis, allowing the NaCL host (i.e. Google Chrome at present) to verify the behaviour of some untrusted binary before ever executing it (just like Java does). I am having a hard time with this. At first I thought this amounted to a claim that the halting problem had been solved, or else that Java and NaC…

Halting problem is literally that the program will halt. That's not provable, even if you offer it on rentacoder.com.

JVM bytecode, .NET CLR bytecode, NACL bytecode are all verified as containing no illegal API calls. That's completely different. And its completely possible.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#68

Post by Dylan16807 »

nextparadigms wrote: post #65

Why is the performance impact of the sandbox with Intel code only 1% while the AMD and ARM code 7%? Is it just because they haven't focused much on optimizing for those or any other reason? I would expect them to at least focus more on ARM, especially if they are porting it to Android.

As quoted on the article, the segmentation technique it uses is only available on x86.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#69

Post by scriptproof »

I am not really favorable to the all-in-the-cloud trend at Google. NaCl seems to be the exact opposite to that and I am as other users (as expressed in a comment above) happy with that. Another point is that it is not a replacement to DirectX. WebGl is this replacement, and WebGL is a common initiative, not a Google's invention.

Re: What I suspect Google is up to with Native Client

#70

Post by forgotusername »

peterwwillis wrote: post #39

I didn't even read past the third paragraph. It's not even the creepy, conspiratorial way he talks... who the hell puts up a single domain, with a single plain-text page of content, with a font big enough for my grandmother to read it, just to complain about Google? It's weird.

The site is not tailored to readers who search for social proof in a WordPress theme; for multiple reasons this was an intentional choice. I'd suggest starting with the two years of my HN comment history.
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