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Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

blog.chromium.org

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Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#271

Post by roca »

sangnoir wrote: post #265
a3_nm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there is functionality that they want which is not standardized, they go ahead and implement it. ... in a non-standardizable way. Why not try to help create a standard instead? What's the benefit of starting with a dirty approach and deprecating it later?

> Why not try to help create a standard instead? They do that as well, it's not one or the other. Google had employees working on WebAssembly (along with Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft). Standards take time to be developed and finalized.

Google had a lot of people working on NaCl and PNaCl for a long time before they started working on WebAssembly.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#272

Post by floatboth »

solomatov wrote: post #147
quickben wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add to that list: - unblockable advertising - stronger DRM - Bitcoin mining that regular user can't detect - etc.. It will be good and bad, but, more bad than good. We could choose not to run .exe .bat and the rest So far, webassbly doesn't look optional.

>- Bitcoin mining that regular user can't detect It makes very little sense to mine on anything other than ASICs.

Ethereum is mined on GPUs (that's why Radeons are out of stock everywhere all the time :D)

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#273

Post by floatboth »

Crontab wrote: post #79
duskwuff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The suggestion I got was that "HTML5 Video" was the subject. Which still doesn't make sense; the alternatives which it replaced (Flash, QuickTime, WMV, Java-based video players...) were all radically worse, and much more abuseable.

HTML5 Video is just an example of shitty browser behavior, as for some reason, every web browser maker seems to think that autoplay videos are great. They're not because sites are abusing it. Worst, some sites these days will waiting until you've scrolled down a bit before they start playing a video, leaving the user to locate it and stop it. As for Flash, it was indeed bad, but at least I had the option of not insta…

> every web browser maker seems to think that autoplay videos are great

I'm pretty sure autoplay is now only allowed on videos without sound — as a replacement for the massive waste of bandwidth that is animated GIFs.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#274

Post by angry_octet »

tehabe wrote: post #245

Am I in the minority that I think it is a positive development, when Google is discarding proprietary ideas in favour of open developments? Not perfect but the direction looks good so far.

If you care about security, performance or having portable offline applications its a sad day. Google just pressed reset and erased your work.

The way Google has abrubtly sent PNaCL to the knackery, rather than a gradual transition is just ugly. By removing the PNaCL functionality completely from builds they have broken faith with the development community. They didn't even commit to allowing PNaCL to run in deprecated mode via a feature flag or something.

In hindsight, I can see that Google had shifted their effort away from PNaCL several years ago. But to kill it they way they have it just brutal.

I would agree that for general web development this seems a way out of the javascript purgatory. But there is a long way to go before it can match what PNaCL did. And I find it bizarre that they created a 32 bit implementation; I know they had reasons but they seem shortsighted.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#275

Post by _0w8t »

roca wrote: post #268
_0w8t wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious what made it necessary to run NaCl in a different process? I thought the main idea behind NaCl was to allow the same-process native sandboxes.

According to https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... NaCl does not sandbox loads, relying on address-space separation to ensure secret data is not leaked. Obviously this only works with a single sandboxed application per address space. (And even then you'd have to be pretty careful!)

This is only for NaCl on ARM or AMD64. The original NaCl for x86 uses the segment registers for isolation allowing to restrict both loads and stores only to the permitted addresses. That, as far as I understand, does allow to embed into 32-bit process without compromising secretes.

So as a speculation in an alternative world where Google has not developed Pepper, but bridged web api into x86 NaCl, the latter designs for x64 and ARM would restrict loads only from the allowed address space.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#276

Post by aluhut »

bas wrote: post #170
ehnto wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt a regular user would notice 100% CPU usage and even less certain that they would know what to do about it or what was causing it. Most OSes operate chrome just fine when another process is asking for 100% as well.

Their fans running at max (or a very warm device) would let them know. This has been the experience among the non/less-technical users in my company.

You must have been working with at least quite young people or something. My experience goes the other way. I've seen people who bought a new computer because their fans were running at max and the reason for that was that they were full with dust and dog hair.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#277

Post by philh »

simonh wrote: post #223
afarrell wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can assure me that is the case, fantastic! Do you know of a way to test the UX of ssh from bash for windows for less than $5 ?

I don't know enough about ssh for Chrome and bash for Windows to get your point. Isn't bash for Windows (as part of WSL?) free? What is it that costs more than $5 using bash for windows but is free with ssh for Chrome? Genuinely interested, I'm on OSX mostly but I'm WSL curious.

I interpreted that as them not having access to a Windows machine and wanting to try out the experience for themselves before attempting to teach someone else.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#278

Post by StavrosK »

dragonwriter wrote: post #195
roca wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google wasted huge resources on an approach which it was obvious from the beginning would never lead to a Web standard. Mozilla people, including me, told Google people even before PNaCl appeared that introducing the whole new non-standard Pepper API was unacceptable.

> Google wasted huge resources on an approach which it was obvious from the beginning would never lead to a Web standard. But it did lead to a web standard, even if it didn't become one. And in the interim, it provided utility to Google. > Mozilla people, including me, told Google people even before PNaCl appeared that introducing the whole new non-standard Pepper API was unacceptable. Yeah, you've mentioned that qui…

Just so I get your argument straight, you're saying that launching a proprietary competitor to the standard means you're helping the standard?

Because then we owe Microsoft and Apple a shitload of thanks.

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#279

Post by DonHopkins »

TimothyFitz wrote: post #33
xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment scared me, but TFA doesn't say that: > We will remove support for PNaCl in the first quarter of 2018 everywhere except inside Chrome Apps and Extensions. Where do you see that chrome apps are being discontinued? Otherwise this is FUD.

EOL for Chrome Apps outside of Chrome OS was announced in August 2016 https://blog.chromium.org/2016/08/from-chrome-apps-to-web.ht...

Better EOL than EOLAS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eolas

Re: Goodbye PNaCl, Hello WebAssembly

#280

Post by candiodari »

dgacmu wrote: post #152
candiodari wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds insane. Do you have any proof ? Google also has goobuntu, which I'm being is what's provided to engineers.

You can choose what kind of laptop you want. ChromeOS is one of the options, and security (+ trivial exchange-ability) is one of the selling points for using a Chromebook. I tried it for a while, but I'm too used to the Mac to have made the switch more easily, so I moved back. But I know quite a few folks who use and love them. Opinions, as I'm sure you can guess, vary widely. It was surprisingly not-bad, even for a…

I wonder about that. Can you use a mac laptop to write software for the Google infrastructure ?

That seems unlikely, if only for the security implications (would apply to any laptop of course, nothing to do with macos or chromeos)

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