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Comment by DannyBee | Hacker News Reader

Your claim that it was ever meant to stay "an x86 sandbox" is contradicted by a lot of things, including the actual launch announcement for NACL:

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/08/native-client-brings-...

" The next milestone for Native Client is architecture independence: Portable Native Client (PNaCl) will achieve this by using LLVM bitcode as the basis for the distribution format for Native Client content, translating it to the actual target instruction set before running. "

I actually dislike PNaCL for a different set of reasons, but claiming it was built as an x86 sandbox, and meant to stay that way, is just revisionist history. If you believed otherwise, it was, in fact, your misunderstanding.

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Your history omits an earlier chapter, which was the period during which Google introduced NaCl to the world.

http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/34913.pdf (2009)

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/sneak-peek-at-native-client... (2010)

No mention of PNaCL anywhere. Eventually they did change their public messaging away from x86 sandbox and towards PNaCl, though not before causing lots of external confusion and fear. And even then, with the time it took to get PNaCl released, some of the external confusion persisted.

The earlier poster does indeed seem to have misunderstood the history, but it's easy to see where such misunderstanding may come from.

This is not how it was introduced, the blog post was the introduction. We published earlier research papers because we publish papers.

The plan was always the same.

Before this, the project wasn't really real, it was just research.

If you consider this "public messaging", then I guess google should never release research papers or research SDK's without fear of being raked over the coals?

If so, that's a sad state of affairs.

You're right that the first link I posted is a research paper, and that it should be interpreted accordingly. It is interesting though that in the paper, they compare NaCl to other systems, some of which include ISA virtualization, and they specifically say "we made a deliberate choice against virtualization". And this paper is just a small sample of what Google was saying about NaCl in 2009. But you're right, it is still a research project at that point.

However, you apparently missed the second link I posted, which is in fact a blog post and an introduction. NaCl is no longer a research project there. In fact, the post itself specifically describes the difference between research releases and the release it is announcing.

They held the sandbox breaking contest (our team came in second!) in 2009. You're suggesting they announced in 2011, right?

I'm suggesting in 2009, it was random cool research (I actually can't even remember whether it was being funded by chrome back then), not something with a real and true plan to become what it is now.

That really didn't happen until late 2010 or 2011, AFAIK.

I think I could debate this point with you, but I just clicked up the thread to see the context (I only found this subthread because I follow your comments) and can now see why we wouldn't want to perpetuate this subthread.

Your original point, that Portable Nacl is within the original charter of the Nacl project, was valid, even if we can quibble about the timelines. :)

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