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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

I think NaCl is already portable across different OSes on the same architecture, since it exposes its own API.

The new part of PNaCl is that you don't have to recompile for each target architecture. Among other things, if they push hard for this for desktop developers on the Chrome App Store, then suddenly they have a large number of things that work on Chromebooks without demanding that developers recompile.

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I'm under the impression that once a game dev compiled for NaCl x86/x86_64 at all, it ran on all of the Chrome binaries on x86/x86_64, i.e. Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chromebook.

There are already a few games on NaCl, like Don't Starve[0] that work on x86/x86_64-based chromebooks. They just don't run on ARM-based chromebooks -- which is one of the incentives for PNaCl.

IIRC, NaCl could only run in Chrome Web Apps precisely because it was platform-dependent. It looks like PNaCl will also allow ActiveX/Flash-style embedding.

[0] http://www.dontstarvegame.com/

You are right. But even with NaCl, the original question remained: would a game dev compile an NaCl app for Linux (even though code changes weren't required.)

PNaCl eliminates a dev's actions to recompile.

NaCl -- even the non-portable form -- doesn't require recompiling for different OS's. It only requires recompilation for different machine architecture (x86 vs. ARM.)

PNaCl removes the need to compile different x86 vs. ARM binaries for NaCl.

This is correct.

A more significant difference is, however, that NaCl is restricted to the Chrome web store, while PNaCl is available on the open web. You can have a PNaCl module your web app, on your website/domain today, and Chrome 31 (and later) will run it.

The two are tied -- the reason Google didn't enable NaCl outside of the Web Store is to avoid architecture-tied NaCl code from becoming common on the web when PNaCl was in the pipeline.

I did not realise this. That is awesome.

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