Google Chrome has a sandboxed VM called Native Client (NaCl) that runs at near full speed. Its very neat.
So they have taken that same VM and, instead of Chrome's Pepper API, they have a file-handle-based API and some message-passing between instances.
Now you can compile your C/C++/whatever program and run it on the cloud!
It seems an excellent building-block for big data and big crunching on the cloud, and it gets the benefit of Google's massive resources on security and performance fixes.
Comments
I will try and explain it as I understand it:
Google Chrome has a sandboxed VM called Native Client (NaCl) that runs at near full speed. Its very neat.
So they have taken that same VM and, instead of Chrome's Pepper API, they have a file-handle-based API and some message-passing between instances.
Now you can compile your C/C++/whatever program and run it on the cloud!
It seems an excellent building-block for big data and big crunching on the cloud, and it gets the benefit of Google's massive resources on security and performance fixes.
If I'm not mistaken, NaCl's integration with Chrome is actually implemented using Pepper.
EDIT: I found something on this. "NaCl was integrated into Chrome 5 as an in-process Pepper plugin. The NaCl modules that it runs can utilize the Pepper API for browser interaction." (http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/getting-started/getting...)
Exactly; that's what they don't do; they use a file-handle-based IO instead of peppar (which has file opening libraries and event loops of its own)