back to article Google extends ARM to browser natives

Google has told the world that Native Client - its native-code browser plug-in - can now run on ARM chips. When the plug-in was first released a year ago, it only ran on x86 processors, but the company has now updated the platform for x86-64 and ARM. In a blog post, Google said that its initial tests indicate that on both …

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  1. SlabMan

    Errrmmm....

    Isn't this just Java reinvented?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    ..so many ways...

    ..so many ways for the future nasty cracker to get access to someones system. mmm. guarantee a few nasty sploits as people try to get savvy with the tech.

  3. LawLessLessLaw
    Boffin

    round and round and round it goes

    Step up Step up, think your universal binary mechanism can take the crown?

    Does your virtual machine beat all comers for security and user friendliness ?

    Then let's hear about it folks, all you need is mindhsare and users.

  4. gerryg

    pseudo's corner

    Come back Pascal, p-code and Dijkstra, all is forgiven.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Isn't this just Java reinvented?

    Possibly.

    But long before there was Java there was UCSD Pascal. 1978, or thereabouts. Same idea, portable machine-independent code.

    To an outsider it looks like every generation of newbies in IT ignores everything that happened in the years before and thus reinvents their own wheels. The ideas of reuse and incremental improvement are not welcome. Not Invented Here rules, OK?

  6. Tom 7

    ARM netbooks - yeh right!

    Who wants a small pocket-able PC that runs for 10hours on a charge and does everything you need in this modern computing world?

    Intel and MS say no-one does so it wont happen.

  7. sleepy

    p-code? you youngsters know nothing

    p-code came after the late 60's o-code, used in BCPL.

    Elegant and expressive BCPL was sidelined by its illiterate bastard C derivative, which blighted my entire career even more than Microsoft the destroyer did. Forgive them Lord, for they knew not what they did.

    Yes, this is also precisely Java and the JVM all over again, among others. In o-code days machine memory was about 10^5 bytes; today it's about 10^10. So with each order of magnitude increase, we've seen a new attempt at the same problem. Microsoft's is proprietary, natch. Maybe this LLVM iteration will finally stick, with Google's backing.

    And for those not paying attention at the back of the class, this is the only way you're going to be able to distribute compiled code on the next generation of platforms without going via the platform owner's provenance-auditing app store. And a good thing too. Live with it, and get off Apple's case.

  8. Ebeneser

    Freedom?

    Here's one technology you won't be seeing on your iPhone any time soon.

    1. sleepy

      What makes you think that?

      If browser plugins are adequately sandboxed and restricted to API's that don't threaten privacy or security, and battery life has been improved sufficiently, I see no reason why not. Of course the plugin itself would be delivered by Apple, not Google. (Like Chrome, Safari on Mac already runs plugins in a separate process.)

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