Talk:Google Native Client

This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
It is of interest to the following WikiProjects:

Google Low‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Google, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Google and related topics on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.GoogleWikipedia:WikiProject GoogleTemplate:WikiProject GoogleGoogle

Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

WikiProject Google To-do:

Here are some tasks awaiting attention:

Article requests : Articles for most of the other products listed here and here.
Assess : All articles in the Category:Unknown-importance Google articles and Category:Unassessed Google articles using the project's assessment scale
Expand : Google Mapathon, Google Talkback
Maintain : This WikiProject
Merge : Google Mobile Services into List of Google products
Stubs : Category:Stub-Class Google articles and Category:Google stubs
Update : List of features in Android and Gmail interface#Product integration. Update logos of Google Marketing Platform products
Other :
- Add more stuff to this to do list if you like! (click here...)
- create:
- Help the Google article for a good article status
- Improve the Outline of Google
- Get more members using :
{{subst:Wikipedia:WikiProject Google/Invite Members}}
- Infobox Images with transparent areas needing a different background color

Computing: Software / Websites / Security Low‑importance

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing

Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

This article is supported by WikiProject Software (assessed as Low-importance).

This article is supported by WikiProject Websites (assessed as Low-importance).

This article is supported by WikiProject Computer security (assessed as Low-importance).

Things you can help WikiProject Computer security with:

How you can help:

Add to your watchlist the project talk page! Post there for help with articles or to suggest articles that need work.
Request editing suggestions on your talk page by entering WikiProject_Computer_security into this template.
Check the article alerts to participate in deletion discussions, review Good Article nominees, and review draft articles.
Edit any articles that interest you. Recommended:
- Most popular articles that need the most work (last refreshed 28 June 2026)
- Popular articles (monthly top articles by views)
- High-importance stub-quality articles
- High-importance start-quality articles
- Mid-importance stub-quality articles
- Mid-importance start-quality articles
- Unknown-importance stub-quality articles
- Unknown-importance start-quality articles
Review changes to popular articles or changes to talk pages.
Replace deprecated archival service links.
Fix something on the list of articles that need cleanup, including:
- Clarification needed
- Rewrite needed
- Expansion needed
- Style editing needed
- Update needed
- Orphaned (add links from other articles to these articles)
- Conflict of interest
- Original research
- Promotional tone
- Biographies of living persons (BLP) articles lacking sources
- Cites no sources
- Cites unreliable sources

Of the 3611 articles in this project 1992 or 55% are marked for cleanup, with 4046 issues in total.

Editing resources:

it is NOW dynamic recompilation

It thought it should be "NOT dynamic recompilation" but he really says "NOW".

It's here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk&t=2h36m25s

If I had to guess, he's referring to the move from NaCl to PNaCl. —ajf (talk) 15:58, 18 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

PNaCl is the compiler that targets nacl-le32 instead of native nacl-x86_64, nacl-i686, nacl-arm and nacl-mips. Pexe to nexe translation is a static recompilation, in fact the pexe format is LLVM bitcode, with the last compilation step being done right before execution, allowing developers to ship one pexe instead of many nexe, one per architecture, with the idea of a PNaCl runtime to “convert” (finishing the compilation) the pexe to the arch-specific nexe on user's system. The pexe-to-nexe translation can also be used by developers for building a single pexe target (compiling every compilation units only once) and to translate it to native nexe before shipping.

the latest pepper canary (pepper 58 from February 2 2017) still relies on pnacl-translate which is a toolchain set of Unix bash and python scripts. It looks like projects for faster static translators (there had been names floating in the air like “subzero”) never went to shipping either. The pnacl-translate tool was very slow, and letting the user wait literate minutes when loading a page wouldn't be good. To give a comparison, the pnacl-translate which translates the whole compiled application as once is as slow as LTO linking of executable of similar size. It's “probable” that Google had hidden the technical details to developers, allowing developers to push pexe-only applications to Google application/extension store and did the native translation behind the scene before delivering to users. It's probable that PNaCl translation “as a runtime” never went into production, as Google Pepper did not shipped translators for some of the targets like arm (so arm how could not translate pexe to arm nexe with pepper tools…) and third-party NaCl platforms like the Dæmon engine never shipped the translator either.

Latest NaCl toolchain (Saigo compiler based on Clang 21 and maintained until January of 2025) doesn't compile to pexe, only to nacl-x86_64, nacl-i686, and nacl-arm.

There may have been projects for dynamic recompilation, but it's doubtful it ever went in production (if not even materialized as proof of concepts…) So here John Carmack likely mixed-up some words, or was actually talking about some deep behind-the scene projects but was a bit optimistic about the actual status of it (the Keynote is almost 4-hours long, so imprecisions can happen).

Once can look at the Dæmon game engine which still uses NaCl in 2026 and maintains both the Saigo NaCl SDK and the NaCl runtime after Google end of support:

The Dæmon engine is idTech-based but was forked years before NaCl existed, so the Dæmon NaCl implementation isn't related to any Carmack's experiment with NaCl, and Carmack may have known things that Dæmon developers never knew. So the quote is the quote, but there is likely a small mistake in it or a reference to something that never went in production. Illwieckz (talk) 05:16, 8 July 2026 (UTC)[reply]

-O4

It's now dynamic recompilation, but something that you program in C or C++ and it compiles down to something that's going to be not your -O4 optimization level for completely native code but pretty damn close to native code.

I assume the -O4 refers to gcc? At least in that case anything higher than -O3 is still only -O3. Maybe that should be changed and linked to avoid confusion? 93.209.20.132 (talk) 13:41, 24 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

It's a quote, nothing should be changed in it. 190.188.181.195 (talk) 02:04, 8 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not only it's a quote, but it's very likely an intentional Exaggeration used as a Superlative to express the idea of absolute peak optimization in his comparison. It is very likely not even a mistake to begin with but an intentional creative wording. So not only the quote should be delivered verbatim as a matter of principle, but removing the purposed dramatic effect would likely go against the Author's moral rights. For example a translation would have to retain such “past the known limit” exaggeration even if worded differently in another language or with another writing system. Illwieckz (talk) 05:41, 8 July 2026 (UTC)[reply]

ARM implementation

It's not clear from the text if the ARM implementation still executes x86 code, or it is running ARM binaries? SyP (talk) 13:58, 12 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I asked it on the mailing list and corrected the article accordingly. SyP (talk) 12:54, 13 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Neither, it's clear from the sources though that it will use Bitcode and a LLVM compiler to produce completely portable code that is platform independent called PNaCL. ShadowEO (talk) 18:23, 20 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

That comment talked about something future (“will”) while the question was about the present (“still”), the current status in 2026 is that it executes 32-bit arm, amd64 and i686, according to the platform, and that pexe has to be converted to native (arm/amd64/i686) nexe first. Illwieckz (talk) 05:20, 8 July 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Should we add a criticism section & Refusal by Opera & Mozilla/firefox for inclusion

I think we should have a criticism section and/or or potential drawbacks. Including potential security issues as experienced by similar tech before (including ActiveX, Java, Flash etc) and lock-in into select few CPUs/Platforms. How mature is NaCL on x86/IA-32 CPUs?

Apart from licensing, what are its advantages over ActiveX, Flash & Java?

Should also include the claim by Mozilla and Opera that they do not plan including support for NaCL in their respective browsers?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/24/jay_sullivan_on_firefox/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/01/opera_on_google_native_client/

-Sinebot_will_rat_me_out —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.173.9.215 (talk) 12:58, 5 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

NaCL Box

Not sure where to put this so I'll just add the link and info NaCL Box (http://www.naclbox.com/) is apparently a port of DosBox to native client. --Xero (talk) 00:53, 11 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Merge Pepper

Pepper/PPAPI currently has a section in this article and a section in NPAPI with overlapping content. They should be merged, maybe into a new article. --88.73.36.175 (talk) 12:16, 5 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Portable Native Client (PNaCl)

PNaCl should have it's own article or section. NaCl has been rejected by Mozilla and others for good reasons, but many of their arguments don't hold for PNaCl. The use of cross-architecture LLVM code sandboxed in a browser – a potential fast multilingual replacement for JavaScript – is a very interesting idea (especially as ‘web apps’ become more prevalent), and should be covered in more detail. —James Haigh (talk) 2013-05-23T19:21:32Z

at more than half the native speed

So "at more than half the native speed" would be 150% as in overclocking... uh, Huston please check. Also, the activex comments have excessive punctuation (in my opinion). TIA. (I'm too exhausted to fix) 75.142.138.213 (talk) 05:26, 4 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You misread. For a native speed of 1, half the native speed is 0.5. So more than half the native speed is >0.5 - still less than 1, the (theoretical) maximum speed. —ajf (talk) 17:03, 4 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Google Native Client. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120502135033/http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf to http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/site/pnacl.pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Y An editor has reviewed this edit and fixed any errors that were found.

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 04:35, 23 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Update. Google Native Client has rode off into the sunset. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 73.222.134.211 (talk) 20:29, 27 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]