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qjz

I especially liked the part where smoke came out of the fan vent on my laptop.

But seriously, if this is where things are headed, why not just run compiled binaries in the browser? There, I said it.

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> why not just run compiled binaries in the browser

Indeed, this is the whole point of NaCl.

http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

Compiled for what platform? jamii mentions NaCl, but x86 is a very complicated architecture to emulate. Java applets are better, but there is still a lot of overhead (and most people never performance optimize their Java). I would like to see a plugin system based on LLVM, but we have a ways to go there.

http://code.google.com/p/nacl-llvm-branches/

NaCL is a verifier and a set of userland syscalls, not an emulator.

All of the heavy lifting that this demo is doing can (and should) be done on the GPU. WebGL should allow that, and the next versions of firefox, chrome, and safari will ship with it (you can play with it in their nightly builds).

Amen to that, I was going to point out the same thing. With the new drivers from AMD supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 on all their cards and Nvidia supporting Opengl 4.1(full OpenGL ES compatibility) for their newest cards (fermi) WebGL is going to kick ass. I'm already using it in Firefox 4 beta 2 and chrome nightlies for work (building some scientific visualization software with it).

It's harder to verify that a program doesn't violate the browser's security policies and try to get out of the sandbox. That's why NaCl is such an impressive project.

I don't think compilation per se would make this sort of program run faster. The slowness would be better addressed by giving a lot of computation to the GPU, which is the direction browsers are headed (e.g. WebGL). For whatever reason, people don't like compiling stuff, and I think that's a primary constraint.

All of this because people are too lazy to install software? Why not just run compiled binaries in the operating system?

Because it's more fun to make the web do things it was never intended for and it's still the closest thing we have to a universal write once platform.

Applets, clickonce etc.

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