"It was introduced in 1996 and is commonly used in its Windows operating system. In principle it is not dependent on Microsoft Windows, but in practice, most ActiveX controls require either Microsoft Windows or a Windows emulator. Most also require the client to be running on Intel x86 hardware, because they contain compiled code."
What rational comparison do you have between NaCL's constrained syscall interface + Pepper, and ActiveX?
> Yep, so non-portable that they released a Mac SDK back when Macs were PowerPC. Super non-portable. The non-portablest.
Which produced binaries that couldn't run on any other PPC OS other than Mac OS, and provided a runtime that couldn't run the ActiveX controls being deployed for Windows clients, even if it was somehow magically possible to run x86 code.
It was explicitly advertised as being non-portable, as a feature: "Developers can create ActiveX Controls for the Mac that integrate with other components and leverage the full functionality of the Mac operating system, taking advantage of features such as Apple QuickTime."
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/1996/oct96/macpr.a...
So, yes, "non-portablest".
What exactly is the equivalence to (P)NaCL?