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Google's Native Client is the most exciting thing to happen to the web in a long time. IMVU has always talked about porting our client to the web, but the exis

Google's Native Client is the most exciting thing to happen to the web in a long time. IMVU has always talked about porting our client to the web, but the existing technologies just aren't good enough: Unity3D doesn't support software rendering, Flash is too slow, JavaScript is too slow... Native Client would let us continue to use our SSE-optimized rendering code, securely, without requiring a download. A colleague was playing around with the NaCl SDK and he said the example app is Quake. Within a day or so, he had an in-browser demo running 9 instances of Quake, with sound, all at the same time. All this noise about HTML 5 and video codecs? With Native Client, the web app could include whatever codec it wanted. Ever notice that a simple 2D game such as Farmville runs at 15 frames per second, even on a machine that can play Crysis or Supreme Commander? With Native Client, we'll start to see these types of truly rich experiences on the web. I'm sorry, Flash, but the web is changing without you... Edit: I see there is a lot of concern about security. NaCl uses x86 segment restrictions to build a sandbox for untrusted x86 code. Google ran a contest to try to poke holes in it: http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/ http://code.google.com/contests/nativeclient-security/

Tiktaalik 16y ago
Yeah I gotta say, from my point of view, coming from the games industry, this development seems pretty awesome.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
It's looking more and more like we are entering a new age of web/browser innovation. Google, Mozilla, Apple and sometimes Opera are in a browser arms race, each pumping up the speed and capabilities of html/css/javascript to heights not many people imagined they could go 5 or 10 years ago. And with stuff like native client and soon LLVM support I think we're going to see an explosion of innovation as people discover what's possible with the new web. Long ago some crazy folks managed to cram most of the guts of a processor onto a single integrated circuit, allowing the creation of a crude yet functional general purpose computer with a single printed circuit board and a few commodity support components. This enabled the creation of "personal" computers that were cheap enough and small enough for nearly anyone to own. At first they were far, far less capable than the mainframes and mini-computers of the day, and written off by many professionals as merely toys. But the nature and simplicity of their construction as well as the expanded potential user and developer base enabled for a faster rate of evolution than old style computer systems. At first micro-computers could only run native code, then people started writing simple interpreters and compilers, then developers created command line operating systems, just as had happened for mainframe computers decades ago, the micro-computer was simply playing catch up. But micro-computer development caught up extraordinarily quickly, and then began to surpass mini-computers and mainframes (as the rate of evolution didn't change after having caught up). Mini-computers quickly died out as specialized micro-computers began to take over their old roles. Will things be the same for the web? In 5 or 10 years will we see web based applications and games more advanced than photoshop, visual studio, and Halo today?

Tiktaalik 16y ago

Yeah I gotta say, from my point of view, coming from the games industry, this development seems pretty awesome.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

It's looking more and more like we are entering a new age of web/browser innovation. Google, Mozilla, Apple and sometimes Opera are in a browser arms race, each pumping up the speed and capabilities of html/css/javascript to heights not many people imagined they could go 5 or 10 years ago. And with stuff like native client and soon LLVM support I think we're going to see an explosion of innovation as people discover what's possible with the new web. Long ago some crazy folks managed to cram most of the guts of a processor onto a single integrated circuit, allowing the creation of a crude yet functional general purpose computer with a single printed circuit board and a few commodity support components. This enabled the creation of "personal" computers that were cheap enough and small enough for nearly anyone to own. At first they were far, far less capable than the mainframes and mini-computers of the day, and written off by many professionals as merely toys. But the nature and simplicity of their construction as well as the expanded potential user and developer base enabled for a faster rate of evolution than old style computer systems. At first micro-computers could only run native code, then people started writing simple interpreters and compilers, then developers created command line operating systems, just as had happened for mainframe computers decades ago, the micro-computer was simply playing catch up. But micro-computer development caught up extraordinarily quickly, and then began to surpass mini-computers and mainframes (as the rate of evolution didn't change after having caught up). Mini-computers quickly died out as specialized micro-computers began to take over their old roles. Will things be the same for the web? In 5 or 10 years will we see web based applications and games more advanced than photoshop, visual studio, and Halo today?