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Comment by sofaofthedamned | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about all of this - is WebAssembly related to the Google Native Client stuff they did and are now deprecating? Is there a write-up of how it works?

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First there was NaCl which was a subset of x86 code leveraging x86 features to sandbox the execution. This x86 subset was produced by a special toolchain and could be verified before running.

Then PNaCl came along with a platform-independent bitcode format based on LLVM IR, which was translated to host's native code in the browser.

Then WASM (also platform-independent) came along striving to be a multi-vendor solution. Unlike the other two WASM directly targets the JavaScript engine. It started out as a serialization format for JavaScript AST.

Adding to this, PNaCl relies heavily on Chrome's sandbox, so any third-party implementation of PNaCl would involve re-implementing large swaths of Chrome. It's not as portable as you'd think. WASM was designed from the ground up to not depend on any browser's implementation.

No other than that it's meant to be used in much the same way and has some of the same developers working on it.

This might help you:

https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md

Thank you, very useful.

http://webassembly.org/ should have the information you want.

Google Native Client is not deprecated, it is still supported in Chrome, and in many ways exceeds the capabilities of WebAssembly.

WebAssembly is very different, and in Chrome it is implemented on top of TurboFan, V8's code generator, rather than Native Client.

Thank you. It's interesting to see the original idea of NC growing and becoming cross-browser.

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