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Concept
Google Native Client
Summary
Google Native Client (NaCl) is a discontinued sandboxing technology for running either a subset of Intel x86, ARM, or MIPS native code, or a portable executable, in a sandbox. It allows safely running native code from a web browser, independent of the user operating system, allowing web apps to run at near-native speeds, which aligns with Google's plans for ChromeOS. It may also be used for securing browser plugins, and parts of other applications or full applications such as ZeroVM.
To demonstrate the readiness of the technology, on 9 December 2011, Google announced the availability of several new Chrome-only versions of games known for their rich and processor-intensive graphics, including Bastion (no longer supported on the Chrome Web Store). NaCl runs hardware-accelerated 3D graphics (via OpenGL ES 2.0), sandboxed local file storage, dynamic loading, full screen mode, and mouse capture. There were also plans to make NaCl available on handheld devices.
Portable Native Client (PNaCl) is an architecture-independent version. PNaCl apps are compiled ahead-of-time. PNaCl is recommended over NaCl for most use cases. The general concept of NaCl (running native code in web browser) has been implemented before in ActiveX, which, while still in use, has full access to the system (disk, memory, user-interface, registry, etc.). Native Client avoids this issue by using sandboxing.
An alternative by Mozilla was asm.js, which also allows applications written in C or C++ to be compiled to run in the browser and also supports ahead-of-time compilation, but is a subset of JavaScript and hence backwards-compatible with browsers that do not support it directly.
On 12 October 2016, a comment on the Chromium issue tracker indicated that Google's Pepper and Native Client teams had been destaffed. On 30 May 2017, Google announced deprecation of PNaCl in favor of WebAssembly. Although initially Google planned to remove PNaCl in first quarter of 2018, and later in the second quarter of 2019, it has been removed in June 2022 (together with Chrome Apps).
Official source
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WebAssembly
WebAssembly (sometimes abbreviated Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs as well as software interfaces for facilitating interactions between such programs and their host environment. The main goal of WebAssembly is to enable high-performance applications on web pages, "but it does not make any Web-specific assumptions or provide Web-specific features, so it can be employed in other environments as well.
Chromium (web browser)
Chromium is a free and open-source web browser project, mainly developed and maintained by Google. This codebase provides the vast majority of code for the Google Chrome browser, which is proprietary software and has some additional features. Chromium's logo is identical in shape to that of Google Chrome, but with blue colors instead of being multicolor. The Chromium codebase is widely used. Microsoft Edge, Samsung Internet, Opera, and many other browsers are based on the Chromium code.
Asm.js
asm.js is a subset of JavaScript designed to allow computer software written in languages such as C to be run as web applications while maintaining performance characteristics considerably better than standard JavaScript, which is the typical language used for such applications. asm.js consists of a strict subset of JavaScript, to which code written in statically typed languages with manual memory management (such as C) is translated by a source-to-source compiler such as Emscripten (based on LLVM).