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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Merge this with Android, to enable highly optimized games and data-intensive applications that run on all Android platforms. Heck, have the OS implemented with this.

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I really don't think there's that much integration going on at Google. Maybe eventually but for now, from the outside, it really feels like they're trying to go into many somewhat unrelated directions and hoping some interesting paths reveal themselves and if they converge then so much the better.

From the original sources,( http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/sneak-peek-at-native-client... ), it seems that this is only x86/x86-64 compatible, wheras most android deployments run on ARM. I don't know how they hope to get around that, as mobile devices seem to be tied closely to the future to the web.

That has changed. Native Client now supports ARM:

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/03/native-client-and-web-porta...

They're also working on what they consider the Right Thing: instead of sending instructions for a particular processor, send LLVM bytecode and have the client finish the compilation.

I remember reading somewhere from the NativeClient developers that they have thought about ARM, but just didn't focus on it yet. Of course ARM probably requires some significant new code because you can't use the same barrier technology as x86/x86-64 (or so I think).

It's fairly easy to port Android to x86 platforms, in fact we have some working in our lab. The target here would not be mobile devices but set-top-boxes. It's known that Google is working on an Android STB; however, it seems Chrome OS would be another good choice.

The issue isn't "Can Android run on x86" but "Can the shiny new features Google is developing run on Android phones that already exist?"

Perhaps they will. webOS just release their PDK to allow this. http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&v...

Google can't let Palm get the upper hand, can they? ;)

Android has had an NDK for a while, maybe 8 months: http://developer.android.com/sdk/ndk/index.html

You can code in C and C++ but not with nice javascript bindings like native client has.

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