When the web started off in 1989 at CERN, it was just a collection of static HTML documents, the first browsers were little more than document viewers, and computing still happend largely on big servers connected to many thin-client workstations. Much has changed over the last 20 years. Computing has moved from a the server-terminal model to the personal computers we know, and as web browsers are rapidly transforming from document viewers into sandboxed Javascript runtime environments, something amazing is happening: computing is moving back to a client-server model, with servers located in the cloud serving web applications running in the browser sandbox.
With browsers transforming into target platforms for general application development, there comes a desire for software running at near-native speed, something which a highly dynamic language like Javascript still has a hard time to deliver (even though Javascript runtimes have improved speed tremendously over the last years). It is not surprising that Google has come up with their own answer to this problem: Google native client (NaCl) allows native C/C++ code to be compiled to run directly in the browser and has been part of Chrome since version 14 (November 2011). In this blog post, I’ll take a closer look at this technology and explore how it works. Weiterlesen →