Hacker News Reader

Comment by pifflesnort | Hacker News Reader

> This is misleading. NaCl exists for both these platforms, but it doesn't support running the same code on each; NaCl lets you run native x86-compiled code on x86 and native ARM-compiled code on ARM.

I didn't intend for this to be misleading -- the option to deploy code specific to each architecture is a benefit.

It means you can take advantage of the architecture's specific features (such as NEON and SSE).

View on HN

> I didn't intend for this to be misleading -- running code specific to each architecture is a benefit.

Permitting it may be a benefit in some cases,

Being limited to it, as NaCl is until client-side PNaCl is ready, is a disadvantage.

Which is why Google is not enabling NaCl by default on the web (i.e., outside of the Chrome Web Store) until client-side PNaCl is ready -- they don't want needless proliferation of non-portable NaCl code on the web. And, I suspect, they want to make the .pexe-to-.nexe process as efficient, in terms of code generation, as possible, so as to minimize the scope of cases where specific-platform-targetting is necessary.

The phase that the web camp is in currently reminds me of a brief phase with Java in the 90's where everything was going to be rewritten on top of the JVM and all heterogeneity in computing stacks was going to disappear overnight.

Sure, thats why all those NaCL based apps in the chrome store work so well on my ARM based chromebook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com