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Comment by peppertree | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know if future versions of chrome will come bundled with ruby runtime? Or is it going to be a plugin download.

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Probably never. NaCl lets you embed programs into a webpage, protected by a layer in between the OS and the actual code so that it can't break out and wreak havoc like ActiveX once did.

So this means that any website could embed Ruby code (more strictly speaking, it could embed a Ruby interpreter) to be executed client-side on a browser supporting NaCl.

The whole point of NaCl is to stop bundling runtimes with the browser. You can develop in whatever language you like as long as it can compile to NaCl byte-code.

That said there could be a Chrome app that is a Ruby interpreter running on NaCl.

The whole point of NaCl is to stop bundling runtimes with the browser

Ironically enough that's exactly what NaCl itself is.

I think that's stretching the definition; NaCl is part of the runtime environment, but only as a sandbox which programs won't notice unless they go off the rails. Unless you meant Pepper, which does provide enough platform support for a port of the flash plugin. But Pepper is an API, and the functionality it gives access to would be part of Chrome anyway.

Ruby will likely be packaged as a PNaCl library, and silently pulled by any chrome application or extension that uses it.

That's like asking if Chrome is going to come with Adblock Plus or some other random extension or app...

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